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diff --git a/old/6916-h.htm.2014-10-15 b/old/6916-h.htm.2014-10-15 new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a8cd0ad --- /dev/null +++ b/old/6916-h.htm.2014-10-15 @@ -0,0 +1,6886 @@ +<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?> +<!DOCTYPE html + PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" + "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> + +<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> + +<head> + +<title>English Men of Letters: Coleridge, by H. D. Traill</title> +<style type="text/css"> +<!-- + h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 { text-align: center; font-variant: small-caps; font-weight: bold } + h1, h2 { margin-top: 2em } + h3, h4 { margin-top: 1.5em } + h5, h6 { margin-top: 1.25em } + + + p.verse { margin-left: 25px } + + div.index { margin-left: 50px } + div.index p { text-indent: -15px }; +--> +</style> +</head> + +<body> + + +<pre> + +Project Gutenberg's English Men of Letters: Coleridge, by H. D. Traill + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most +other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions +whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of +the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at +www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have +to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. + +Title: English Men of Letters: Coleridge + +Author: H. D. Traill + +Posting Date: October 15, 2014 [EBook #6916] +Release Date: November, 2004 +First Posted: February 10, 2003 + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: UTF-8 + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS: COLERIDGE *** + + + + +Produced by Curtis A. Weyant, Charles Franks, and the +Distributed Proofreading Team. + + + + + + +</pre> + + +<h1>English Men of Letters:</h1> +<h1>Coleridge</h1> + +<p style="text-align: center;">by</p> + +<h3>H. D. Traill</h3> + + +<h2>Prefatory Note.</h2> + +<p>In a tolerably well-known passage in one of his essays De Quincey +enumerates the multiform attainments and powers of Coleridge, and the +corresponding varieties of demand made by them on any one who should +aspire to become this many-sided man's biographer. The description is +slightly touched with the humorous hyperbole characteristic of its +author; but it is in substance just, and I cannot but wish that it were +possible, within the limits of a preface, to set out the whole of it in +excuse for the many inevitable shortcomings of this volume. Having thus +made an "exhibit" of it, there would only remain to add that the +difficulties with which De Quincey confronts an intending biographer of +Coleridge must necessarily be multiplied many-fold by the conditions +under which this work is here attempted. No complete biography of +Coleridge, at least on any important scale of dimensions, is in +existence; no critical appreciation of his work <i>as a whole</i>, and +as correlated with the circumstances and affected by the changes of his +life, has, so far as I am aware, been attempted. To perform either of +these two tasks adequately, or even with any approach to adequacy, a +writer should at least have the elbow-room of a portly volume. To +attempt the two together, therefore, and to attempt them within the +limits prescribed to the manuals of this series, is an enterprise +which I think should claim, from all at least who are not offended by +its audacity, an almost unbounded indulgence.</p> + +<p>The supply of material for a <i>Life</i> of Coleridge is fairly plentiful, +though it is not very easily come by. For the most part it needs to be +hunted up or fished up – those accustomed to the work will appreciate +the difference between the two processes – from a considerable variety +of contemporary documents. Completed biography of the poet-philosopher +there is none, as has been said, in existence; and the one volume of +the unfinished <i>Life</i> left us by Mr. Gillman – a name never to be +mentioned with disrespect, however difficult it may sometimes be to +avoid doing so, by any one who honours the name and genius of +Coleridge – covers, and that in but a loose and rambling fashion, no +more than a few years. Mr. Cottle's <i>Recollections of Southey, +Wordsworth, and Coleridge</i> contains some valuable information on +certain points of importance, as also does the <i>Letters, Conversations, +etc., of S. T. C.</i> by Mr. Allsop. Miss Meteyard's <i>Group of Eminent +Englishmen</i> throws much light on the relations between Coleridge and +his early patrons the Wedgwoods. Everything, whether critical or +biographical, that De Quincey wrote on Coleridgian matters requires, +with whatever discount, to be carefully studied. <i>The Life of Wordsworth,</i> +by the Bishop of St. Andrews; <i>The Correspondence of Southey;</i> +the Rev. Derwent Coleridge's brief account of his father's life and +writings; and the prefatory memoir prefixed to the 1880 edition of +Coleridge's <i>Poetical and Dramatic Works</i>, have all had to be +consulted. But, after all, there remain several tantalising gaps in +Coleridge's life which refuse to be bridged over; and one cannot but +think that there must be enough unpublished matter in the possession +of his relatives and the representatives of his friends and +correspondents to enable some at least, though doubtless not all, of +these missing links to be supplied. Perhaps upon a fitting occasion +and for an adequate purpose these materials would be forthcoming.</p> + + + +<h1>Contents.</h1> + +<h2><b>Poetical Period.</b></h2> + +<h3><a href="#chap1">Chapter I.</a><br /> +1772-1794.</h3> +<blockquote>Birth, parentage, and early years – Christ's Hospital – Jesus College, +Cambridge.</blockquote> + +<h3><a href="#chap2">Chapter II.</a><br /> +1794-1797.</h3> +<blockquote>The Bristol Lectures – Marriage – Life at Clevedon – The <i>Watchman</i> – Retirement to Stowey – Introduction to Wordsworth.</blockquote> + +<h3><a href="#chap3">Chapter III.</a><br /> +1797-1799.</h3> +<blockquote>Coleridge and Wordsworth – Publication of the <i>Lyrical Ballads</i> – The +<i>Ancient Mariner</i> – The first part of <i>Christabel</i> – Decline of +Coleridge's poetic impulse – Final review of his poetry.</blockquote> + +<h2><b>Critical Period.</b></h2> + +<h3><a href="#chap4">Chapter IV.</a><br /> +1799-1800.</h3> +<blockquote>Visit to Germany – Life at Göttingen – Return – Explores the Lake country – London – The <i>Morning Post</i> – Coleridge as a journalist – Retirement to +Keswick.</blockquote> + +<h3><a href="#chap5">Chapter V.</a><br /> +1800-1804.</h3> +<blockquote>Life at Keswick – Second part of <i>Christabel</i> – Failing health – Resort +to opium – The <i>Ode to Dejection</i> – Increasing restlessness – Visit to +Malta.</blockquote> + +<h3><a href="#chap6">Chapter VI.</a><br /> +1806-1809.</h3> +<blockquote>Stay at Malta – Its injurious effects – Return to England – Meeting with De +Quincey – Residence in London – First series of lectures.</blockquote> + +<h3><a href="#chap7">Chapter VII.</a><br /> +1809-1810.</h3> +<blockquote>Return to the Lakes – From Keswick to Grasmere – With Wordsworth at Allan +Bank – The <i>Friend</i> – Quits the Lake country for ever.</blockquote> + +<h3><a href="#chap8">Chapter VIII.</a><br /> +1810-1816.</h3> +<blockquote>London again – Second recourse to journalism – The <i>Courier</i> articles – The Shakespeare lectures – Production of <i>Remorse</i> – At Bristol again +as lecturer – Residence at Calne – Increasing ill health and embarrassments + – Retirement to Mr. Gillman's.</blockquote> + +<h2><b>Metaphysical and Theological Period.</b></h2> + +<h3><a href="#chap9">Chapter IX.</a><br /> +1816-1818.</h3> +<blockquote>Life at Highgate – Renewed activity – Publications and republications – The +<i>Biographia Literaria</i> – The lectures of 1818 – Coleridge as a +Shakespearian critic.</blockquote> + +<h3><a href="#chap10">Chapter X.</a><br /> +1818-1834.</h3> +<blockquote>Closing years – Temporary renewal of money troubles – The <i>Aids to +Refection</i> – Growing weakness-Visit to Germany with the Wordsworths – Last illness and death.</blockquote> + +<h3><a href="#chap11">Chapter XI.</a></h3> +<blockquote>Coleridge's metaphysics and theology – <i>The Spiritual Philosophy</i> +of Mr. Green.</blockquote> + +<h3><a href="#chap12">Chapter XII.</a></h3> +<blockquote>Coleridge's position in his later years – His discourse – His +influence on contemporary thought – Final review of his intellectual +work.</blockquote> + +<h3><b><a href="#index">Index.</a></b></h3> + + + +<h1 style="text-align: center; font-variant: small-caps">Coleridge.</h1> + + + +<a name="chap1"></a> +<h2>Chapter I</h2> + +<blockquote>Birth, parentage, and early years – Christ's Hospital – Jesus College, +Cambridge. </blockquote> + +<p style="text-align: center">[1772-1794.]</p> + +<p>On the 21st of October 1772 there was added to that roll of famous +Englishmen of whom Devonshire boasts the parentage a new and not its +least illustrious name. <span style="font-variant: small-caps">Samuel Taylor Coleridge</span> was the son of the Rev. +John Coleridge, vicar of Ottery St. Mary in that county, and head +master of Henry VIII.'s Free Grammar School in the same town. He was +the youngest child of a large family. To the vicar, who had been twice +married, his first wife had borne three children, and his second ten. +Of these latter, however, one son died in infancy; four others, +together with the only daughter of the family, passed away before +Samuel had attained his majority; and thus only three of his brothers, +James, Edward, and George Coleridge, outlived the eighteenth century. +The first of these three survivors became the father of Henry Nelson +Coleridge – who married his cousin Sara, the poet's accomplished +daughter, and edited his uncle's posthumous works – and of the late Mr. +Justice Coleridge, himself the father of the present Lord Chief-Justice +of England. Edward, the second of the three, went, like his eldest +brother William, to Pembroke College, Oxford, and like him took orders; +and George, also educated at the same college and for the same +profession, succeeded eventually to his father's benefice and school. +The vicar himself appears from all accounts to have been a man of more +mark than most rural incumbents, and probably than a good many +schoolmasters of his day. He was a Hebrew scholar of some eminence, and +the compiler of a Latin grammar, in which, among other innovations +designed to simplify the study of the language for "boys just +initiated," he proposed to substitute for the name of "ablative" that +of "quale-quare-quidditive case." The mixture of amiable simplicity and +not unamiable pedantry to which this stroke of nomenclature testifies +was further illustrated in his practice of diversifying his sermons to +his village flock with Hebrew quotations, which he always commended to +their attention as "the immediate language of the Holy Ghost" – a +practice which exposed his successor, himself a learned man, to the +complaint of his rustic parishioners, that for all his erudition no +"immediate language of the Holy Ghost" was ever to be heard from +<i>him</i>. On the whole the Rev. John Coleridge appears to have been a +gentle and kindly eccentric, whose combination of qualities may have +well entitled him to be compared, as his famous son was wont in after-life to compare him, to Parson Adams.</p> + +<p>Of the poet's mother we know little; but it is to be gathered from such +information as has come to us through Mr. Gillman from Coleridge +himself that, though reputed to have been a "woman of strong mind," she +exercised less influence on the formation of her son's mind and +character than has frequently been the case with the not remarkable +mothers of remarkable men. "She was," says Mr. Gillman, "an uneducated +woman, industriously attentive to her household duties, and devoted to +the care of her husband and family. Possessing none even of the most +common accomplishments of her day, she had neither love nor sympathy +for the display of them in others. She disliked, as she would say, your +'harpsichord ladies,' and strongly tried to impress upon her sons their +little value" (that is, of the accomplishments) "in their choice of +wives." And the final judgment upon her is that she was "a very good +woman, though, like Martha, over careful in many things; very ambitious +for the advancement of her sons in life, but wanting, perhaps, that +flow of heart which her husband possessed so largely." Of Coleridge's +boyhood and school-days we are fortunate in being able to construct an +unusually clear and complete idea. Both from his own autobiographic +notes, from the traditionary testimony of his family, and from the no +less valuable evidence of his most distinguished schoolfellow, we know +that his youthful character and habits assign him very conspicuously to +that perhaps somewhat small class of eminent men whose boyhood has +given distinct indications of great things to come. Coleridge is as +pronounced a specimen of this class as Scott is of its opposite. Scott +has shown the world how commonplace a boyhood may precede a maturity of +extraordinary powers. In Coleridge's case a boy of truly extraordinary +qualities was father to one of the most remarkable of men. As the +youngest of ten children (or of thirteen, reckoning the vicar's family +of three by his first wife), Coleridge attributes the early bent of his +disposition to causes the potency of which one may be permitted to +think that he has somewhat exaggerated. It is not quite easy to believe +that it was only through "certain jealousies of old Molly," his brother +Frank's "dotingly fond nurse," and the infusions of these jealousies +into his brother's mind, that he was drawn "from life in motion to life +in thought and sensation." The physical impulses of boyhood, where they +exist in vigour, are not so easily discouraged, and it is probable that +they were naturally weaker and the meditative tendency stronger than +Coleridge in after-life imagined. But to continue: "I never played," he +proceeds, "except by myself, and then only acting over what I had been +reading or fancying, or half one, half the other" (a practice common +enough, it may be remarked, among boys of by no means morbidly +imaginative habit), "cutting down weeds and nettles with a stick, as +one of the seven champions of Christendom. Alas! I had all the +simplicity, all the docility of the little child, but none of the +child's habits. I never thought as a child – never had the language of a +child." So it fared with him during the period of his home instruction, +the first eight years of his life; and his father having, as scholar +and schoolmaster, no doubt noted the strange precocity of his youngest +son, appears to have devoted especial attention to his training. "In my +ninth year," he continues, "my most dear, most revered father died +suddenly. O that I might so pass away, if, like him, I were an +Israelite without guile. The image of my father, my revered, kind, +learned, simple-hearted father, is a religion to me."</p> + +<p>Before he had attained his tenth year a presentation to Christ's +Hospital was obtained for him by that eminent judge Mr. Justice Buller, +a former pupil of his father's; and he was entered at the school on the +18th July 1782. His early bent towards poetry, though it displayed +itself in youthful verse of unusual merit, is a less uncommon and +arresting characteristic than his precocious speculative activity. Many +a raw boy "lisps in numbers, for the numbers come;" but few discourse +Alexandrian metaphysics at the same age, for the very good reason that +the metaphysics as a rule do not "come." And even among those youth +whom curiosity, or more often vanity, induces to dabble in such +studies, one would find few indeed over whom they have cast such an +irresistible spell as to estrange them for a while from poetry +altogether. That this was the experience of Coleridge we have his own +words to show. His son and biographer, the Rev. Derwent Coleridge, has +a little antedated the poet's stages of development in stating that +when his father was sent to Christ's Hospital in his eleventh year he +was "already a poet, and yet more characteristically a metaphysician." +A poet, yes, and a precocious scholar perhaps to boot, but a +metaphysician, no; for the "delightful sketch of him by his friend and +schoolfellow Charles Lamb" was pretty evidently taken not at "this +period" of his life but some years later. Coleridge's own account of +the matter in the <i>Biographia Literaria</i> is clear. [<a href="#foot_1-1">1</a>] "At a very +premature age, even before my fifteenth year," he says, "I had +bewildered myself in metaphysics and in theological controversy. +Nothing else pleased me. History and particular facts lost all interest +in my mind. Poetry (though for a schoolboy of that age I was above par +in English versification, and had already produced two or three +compositions which I may venture to say were somewhat above mediocrity, +and which had gained me more credit than the sound good sense of my old +master was at all pleased with), – poetry itself, yea, novels and +romance, became insipid to me." He goes on to describe how highly +delighted he was if, during his friendless wanderings on leave-days, +"any passenger, especially if he were dressed in black," would enter +with him into a conversation, which he soon found the means of +directing to his favourite subject of "providence, foreknowledge, will, +and fate; fixed fate, freewill, foreknowledge absolute." Undoubtedly it +is to this period that one should refer Lamb's well-known description +of "Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Logician, Metaphysician, Bard."</p> + +<p>"How have I seen the casual passer through the cloisters stand still, +entranced with admiration (while he weighed the disproportion between +the speech and the garb of the young Mirandula), to hear thee unfold in +thy deep and sweet intonations the mysteries of Iamblichus or Plotinus +(for even in those years thou waxedst not pale at such philosophic +draughts), or reciting Homer in the Greek, or Pindar, while the walls +of the old Grey Friars re-echoed with the accents of the <i>inspired +charity-boy</i>."</p> + +<p>It is interesting to note such a point as that of the "deep and sweet +intonations" of the youthful voice – its most notable and impressive +characteristic in after-life. Another schoolfellow describes the young +philosopher as "tall and striking in person, with long black hair," and +as commanding "much deference" among his schoolfellows. Such was +Coleridge between his fifteenth and seventeenth year, and such +continued to be the state of his mind and the direction of his studies +until he was won back again from what he calls "a preposterous pursuit, +injurious to his natural powers and to the progress of his education," +by – it is difficult, even after the most painstaking study of its +explanations, to record the phenomenon without astonishment – a perusal +of the sonnets of William Lisle Bowles. Deferring, however, for the +present any research into the occult operation of this converting +agency, it will be enough to note Coleridge's own assurance of its +perfect efficacy. He was completely cured for the time of his +metaphysical malady, and "well were it for me perhaps," he exclaims, +"had I never relapsed into the same mental disease; if I had continued +to pluck the flowers and reap the harvest from the cultivated surface +instead of delving in the unwholesome quicksilver mines of metaphysic +depths." And he goes on to add, in a passage full of the peculiar +melancholy beauty of his prose, and full too of instruction for the +biographer, "But if, in after-time, I have sought a refuge from bodily +pain and mismanaged sensibility in abstruse researches, which exercised +the strength and subtlety of the understanding without awakening the +feelings of the heart, there was a long and blessed interval, during +which my natural faculties were allowed to expand and my original +tendencies to develop themselves – my fancy, and the love of nature, and +the sense of beauty in forms and sounds." This "long and blessed +interval" endured, as we shall see, for some eleven or twelve years.</p> + +<p>His own account of his seduction from the paths of poetry by the wiles +of philosophy is that physiology acted as the go-between. His brother +Luke had come up to London to walk the hospitals, and young Samuel's +insatiable intellectual curiosity immediately inspired him with a +desire to share his brother's pursuit. "Every Saturday I could make or +obtain leave, to the London Hospital trudged I. O! the bliss if I was +permitted to hold the plaisters or attend the dressings.... I became +wild to be apprenticed to a surgeon; English, Latin, yea, Greek books +of medicine read I incessantly. Blanchard's <i>Latin Medical +Dictionary</i> I had nearly by heart. Briefly, it was a wild dream, +which, gradually blending with, gradually gave way to, a rage for +metaphysics occasioned by the essays on Liberty and Necessity in Cato's +<i>Letters</i>, and more by theology." [<a href="#foot_1-2">2</a>] At the appointed hour, +however, Bowles the emancipator came, as has been said, to his relief, +and having opportunely fallen in love with the eldest daughter of a +widow lady of whose son he had been the patron and protector at school, +we may easily imagine that his liberation from the spell of metaphysics +was complete. "From this time," he says, "to my nineteenth year, when I +quitted school for Jesus, Cambridge, was the era of poetry and love."</p> + +<p>Of Coleridge's university days we know less; but the account of his +schoolfellow, Charles Le Grice, accords, so far as it goes, with what +would have been anticipated from the poet's school life. Although "very +studious," and not unambitious of academical honours – within a few +months of his entering at Jesus he won the Browne Gold Medal for a +Greek Ode on the Slave Trade [<a href="#foot_1-3">3</a>] – his reading, his friend admits, was +"desultory and capricious. He took little exercise merely for the sake +of exercise, but he was ready at any time to unbend his mind in +conversation, and for the sake of this his room was a constant +rendezvous of conversation-loving friends. I will not call them +loungers, for they did not call to kill time but to enjoy it." From the +same record we gather that Coleridge's interest in current politics was +already keen, and that he was an eager reader, not only of Burke's +famous contributions thereto, but even a devourer of all the pamphlets +which swarmed during that agitated period from the press. The desultory +student, however, did not altogether intermit his academical studies. +In 1793 he competed for another Greek verse prize, this time +unsuccessfully. He afterwards described his ode <i>On Astronomy</i> as +"the finest Greek poem I ever wrote;" [<a href="#foot_1-4">4</a>] but, whatever may have been +its merits from the point of view of scholarship, the English +translation of it, made eight years after by Southey (in which form +alone it now exists), seems hardly to establish its title to the +peculiar merit claimed by its author for his earlier effort. The long +vacation of this year, spent by him in Devonshire, is also interesting +as having given birth to one of the most characteristic of the +<i>Juvenile Poems,</i> the <i>Songs of the Pixies</i>, and the closing +months of 1793 were marked by the most singular episode in the poet's +earlier career.</p> + +<p>It is now perhaps impossible to ascertain whether the cause of this +strange adventure of Coleridge's was, "chagrin at his disappointment in +a love affair" or "a fit of dejection and despondency caused by some +debts not amounting to a hundred pounds;" but, actuated by some impulse +or other of restless disquietude, Coleridge suddenly quitted Cambridge +and came up, very slenderly provided with money, to London, where, +after a few days' sojourn, he was compelled by pressure of actual need +to enlist, under the name of Silas Titus Comberback (S. T. C.), [<a href="#foot_1-5">5</a>] as a +private in the 15th Light Dragoons. It may seem strange to say so, but +it strikes one as quite conceivable that the world might have been a +gainer if fate had kept Coleridge a little longer in the ranks than the +four months of his actual service. As it was, however, his military +experiences, unlike those of Gibbon, were of no subsequent advantage to +him. He was, as he tells us, an execrable rider, a negligent groom of +his horse, and, generally, a slack and slovenly trooper; but before +drill and discipline had had time to make a smart soldier of him, he +chanced to attract the attention of his captain by having written a +Latin quotation on the white wall of the stables at Reading. This +officer, who it seems was either able to translate the ejaculation, +"Eheu! quam infortunii miserrimum est fuisse felicem," [<a href="#foot_1-6">6</a>] or, at any +rate, to recognise the language it was written in, interested himself +forthwith on behalf of his scholarly recruit. [<a href="#foot_1-7">7</a>] Coleridge's discharge +was obtained at Hounslow on April 10, 1794, and he returned to +Cambridge.</p> + +<p>The year was destined to be eventful for him in more ways than one. In +June he went to Oxford to pay a visit to an old schoolfellow, where an +accidental introduction to Robert Southey, then an undergraduate of +Balliol, laid the foundation of a friendship destined largely to +influence their future lives. In the course of the following August he +came to Bristol, where he was met by Southey, and by him introduced to +Robert Lovell, through whom and Southey he made the acquaintance of two +persons of considerable, if not exactly equal, importance to any young +author – his first publisher and his future wife. Robert Lovell already +knew Mr. Joseph Cottle, brother of Amos Cottle (Byron's "O! Amos +Cottle! Phoebus! what a name"), and himself a poet of some pretensions; +and he had married Mary Fricker, one of whose sisters, Edith, was +already engaged to Southey; while another, Sara, was afterwards to +become Mrs. Coleridge.</p> + +<p>As the marriage turned out on the whole an unhappy one, the present may +be a convenient moment for considering how far its future character was +determined by previously existing and unalterable conditions, and how +far it may be regarded as the result of subsequent events. De Quincey, +whose acute and in many respects most valuable monograph on the poet +touches its point of least trustworthiness in matters of this kind, +declares roundly, and on the alleged authority of Coleridge himself, +that the very primary and essential prerequisite of happiness was +wanting to the union. Coleridge, he says, assured him that his marriage +was "not his own deliberate act, but was in a manner forced upon his +sense of honour by the scrupulous Southey, who insisted that he had +gone too far in his attentions to Miss Fricker for any honourable +retreat." On the other hand, he adds, "a neutral spectator of the +parties protested to me that if ever in his life he had seen a man +under deep fascination, and what he would have called desperately in +love, Coleridge, in relation to Miss F., was that man." One need not, I +think, feel much hesitation in preferring this "neutral spectator's" +statement to that of the discontented husband, made several years after +the mutual estrangement of the couple, and with no great propriety +perhaps, to a new acquaintance. There is abundant evidence in his own +poems alone that at the time of, and for at least two or three years +subsequently to, his marriage Coleridge's feeling towards his wife was +one of profound and indeed of ardent attachment. It is of course quite +possible that the passion of so variable, impulsive, and irresolute a +temperament as his may have had its hot and cold fits, and that during +one of the latter phases Southey may have imagined that his friend +needed some such remonstrance as that referred to. But this is not +nearly enough to support the assertion that Coleridge's marriage was +"in a manner forced upon his sense of honour," and was not his own +deliberate act. It was as deliberate as any of his other acts during +the years 1794 and 1795, – that is to say, it was as wholly inspired by +the enthusiasm of the moment, and as utterly ungoverned by anything in +the nature of calculation on the possibilities of the future. He fell +in love with Sara Fricker as he fell in love with the French Revolution +and with the scheme of "Pantisocracy," and it is indeed extremely +probable that the emotions of the lover and the socialist may have +subtly acted and reacted upon each other. The Pantisocratic scheme was +essentially based at its outset upon a union of kindred souls, for it +was clearly necessary of course that each male member of the little +community to be founded on the banks of the Susquehanna should take +with him a wife. Southey and Lovell had theirs in the persons of two +sisters; they were his friends and fellow-workers in the scheme; and +they had a sympathetic sister-in-law disengaged. Fate therefore seemed +to designate her for Coleridge and with the personal attraction which +she no doubt exerted over him there may well have mingled a dash of +that mysterious passion for symmetry which prompts a man to "complete +the set." After all, too, it must be remembered that, though Mrs. +Coleridge did not permanently retain her hold upon her husband's +affections, she got considerably the better of those who shared them +with her. Coleridge found out the objections to Pantisocracy in a very +short space of time, and a decided coolness had sprung up between him +and Madame la Revolution before another two years had passed.</p> + +<p>The whole history indeed of this latter <i>liaison</i> is most +remarkable, and no one, it seems to me, can hope to form an adequate +conception of Coleridge's essential instability of character without +bestowing somewhat closer attention upon this passage in his +intellectual development than it usually receives. It is not uncommon +to see the cases of Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge lumped together +indiscriminately, as interequivalent illustrations of the way in which +the young and generous minds of that era were first fascinated and then +repelled by the French Revolution. As a matter of fact, however, the +last of the three cases differed in certain very important respects +from the two former. Coleridge not only took the "frenzy-fever" in a +more violent form than either Wordsworth or Southey, and uttered wilder +things in his delirium than they, but the paroxysm was much shorter, +the <i>immediate</i> reaction more violent in its effects and brought +about by slighter causes in his case than in theirs. This will appear +more clearly when we come to contrast the poems of 1794 and 1795 with +those of 1797. For the present it must suffice to say that while the +history of Coleridge's relations to the French Revolution is +intellectually more interesting than that of Wordsworth's and +Southey's, it plainly indicates, even in that early period of the three +lives, a mind far more at the mercy of essentially transitory sentiment +than belonged to either of the others, and far less disposed than +theirs to review the aspirations of the moment by the steady light of +the practical judgment.</p> + +<p>This, however, is anticipating matters. We are still in the summer of +1794, and we left Coleridge at Bristol with Southey, Lovell, and the +Miss Frickers. To this year belongs that remarkable experiment in +playwriting at high pressure, <i>The Fall of Robespierre</i>. It +originated, we learn from Southey, in "a sportive conversation at poor +Lovell's," when each of the three friends agreed to produce one act of +a tragedy, on the subject indicated in the above title, by the +following evening. Coleridge was to write the first, Southey the +second, and Lovell the third. Southey and Lovell appeared the next day +with their acts complete, Coleridge, characteristically, with only a +part of his. Lovell's, however, was found not to be in keeping with the +other two, so Southey supplied the third as well as the second, by +which time Coleridge had completed the first. The tragedy was +afterwards published entire, and is usually included in complete +editions of Coleridge's poetical works. It is an extremely immature +production, abounding in such coquettings (if nothing more serious) +with bathos as</p> + +<p class="verse"> "Now,<br /> + Aloof thou standest from the tottering pillar,<br /> + And like a frighted child behind its mother,<br /> + Hidest thy pale face in the skirts of Mercy."</p> + +<p>and</p> + +<p class="verse">"Liberty, condensed awhile, is bursting<br /> + To scatter the arch-chemist in the explosion."</p> + +<p>Coleridge also contributed to Southey's <i>Joan of Arc</i> certain +lines of which, many years afterwards, he wrote in this humorously +exaggerated but by no means wholly unjust tone of censure: – "I was +really astonished (1) at the schoolboy, wretched, allegoric machinery; +(2) at the transmogrification of the fanatic Virago into a modern +novel-pawing proselyte of the Age of Reason – a Tom Paine in +petticoats; (3) at the utter want of all rhythm in the verse, the +monotony and dead plumb-down of the pauses, and at the absence of all +bone, muscle, and sinew in the single lines."</p> + +<p>In September Coleridge returned to Cambridge, to keep what turned out +to be his last term at Jesus. We may fairly suppose that he had already +made up his mind to bid adieu to the Alma Mater whose bosom he was +about to quit for that of a more venerable and, as he then believed, a +gentler mother on the banks of the Susquehanna; but it is not +impossible that in any case his departure might have been expedited by +the remonstrances of college authority. Dr. Pearce, Master of Jesus, +and afterwards Dean of Ely, did all he could, records a friend of a +somewhat later date, "to keep him within bounds; but his repeated +efforts to reclaim him were to no purpose, and upon one occasion, after +a long discussion on the visionary and ruinous tendency of his later +schemes, Coleridge cut short the argument by bluntly assuring him, his +friend and master, that he mistook the matter altogether. He was +neither Jacobin, [<a href="#foot_1-8">8</a>] he said, nor Democrat, but a Pantisocrat." And, +leaving the good doctor to digest this new and strange epithet, +Coleridge bade farewell to his college and his university, and went +forth into that world with which he was to wage so painful and variable +a struggle.</p> + +<blockquote style="font-variant: small-caps"><strong>Footnotes</strong></blockquote> + +<p><a name="foot_1-1"></a>1. He tells us in the <i>Biographia Literaria</i> that he had +translated the eight hymns of Synesius from the Greek into English +anacreontics "before his fifteenth year." It is reasonable to suppose, +therefore, that he had more scholarship in 1782 than most boys of ten +years.</p> + +<p><a name="foot_1-2"></a>2. Gillman, pp. 22, 23.</p> + +<p><a name="foot_1-3"></a>3. Of this Coleridge afterwards remarked with justice that its "ideas +were better than the language or metre in which they were conveyed." +Porson, with little magnanimity, as De Quincey complains, was severe +upon its Greek, but its main conception – an appeal to Death to come, a +welcome deliverer to the slaves, and to bear them to shores where "they +may tell their beloved ones what horrors they, being men, had endured +from men" – is moving and effective. De Quincey, however, was +undoubtedly right in his opinion that Coleridge's Greek scholarship was +not of the exact order. No exact scholar could, for instance, have died +in the faith (as Coleridge did) that εστησε (S. T. C.) means "he stood," +and not "he placed."</p> + +<p><a name="foot_1-4"></a>4. Adding "that which gained the prize was contemptible" – an +expression of opinion hardly in accordance with Le Grice's statement +("Recollections" in <i>Gentleman's Magazine</i> for 1836) that "no one +was more convinced of the propriety of the decision than Coleridge +himself." Mr. Le Grice, however, bears valuable testimony to +Coleridge's disappointment, though I think he exaggerates its influence +in determining his career.</p> + +<p><a name="foot_1-5"></a>5. It is characteristic of the punctilious inaccuracy of Mr. Cottle +(<i>Recollections</i>, ii. 54) that he should insist that the assumed +name was "Cumberbatch, not Comberback," though Coleridge has himself +fixed the real name by the jest, "My habits were so little equestrian, +that my horse, I doubt not, was of that opinion." This circumstance, +though trifling, does not predispose us to accept unquestioningly Mr. +Cottle's highly particularised account of Coleridge's experience with +his regiment.</p> + +<p><a name="foot_1-6"></a>6. Miss Mitford, in her <i>Recollections of a Literary Life</i>, +interestingly records the active share taken by her father in +procuring the learned trooper's discharge.</p> + +<p><a name="foot_1-7"></a>7. "In omni adversitate fortunæ, infelicissimum genus est infortunii +fuisse felicem." – <i>Boethius</i>.</p> + +<p><a name="foot_1-8"></a>8. Carrlyon's <i>Early Years and late Reflections</i>, vol. i. p. 27.</p> + + + +<a name="chap2"></a> +<h2>Chapter II</h2> + +<blockquote>The Bristol Lectures – Marriage – Life at Clevedon – The <i>Watchman</i> – +Retirement to Stowey – Introduction to Wordsworth.</blockquote> + +<p style="text-align: center">[1794-1797.]</p> + +<p>The reflections of the worthy Master of Jesus upon the strange reply of +the wayward young undergraduate would have been involved in even +greater perplexity if he could have looked forward a few months into +the future. For after a winter spent in London, and enlivened by those +<i>noctes conoque Deûm</i> at the "Cat and Salutation," which Lamb has +so charmingly recorded, Coleridge returned with Southey to Bristol at +the beginning of 1795, and there proceeded to deliver a series of +lectures which, whatever their other merits, would certainly not have +assisted Dr. Pearce to grasp the distinction between a Pantisocrat and +a Jacobin. As a scholar and a man of literary taste he might possibly +have admired the rhetorical force of the following outburst, but, +considering that the "HE" here gibbeted in capitals was no less a +personage than the "heaven-born minister" himself, a plain man might +well have wondered what additional force the vocabulary of Jacobinism +could have infused into the language of Pantisocracy. After summing up +the crimes of the Reign of Terror the lecturer asks: "Who, my brethren, +was the cause of this guilt if not HE who supplied the occasion and the +motive? Heaven hath bestowed on <i>that man</i> a portion of its +ubiquity, and given him an actual presence in the sacraments of hell, +wherever administered, in all the bread of bitterness, in all the cups +of blood." And in general, indeed, the <i>Conciones ad Populum</i>, as +Coleridge named these lectures on their subsequent publication, were +rather calculated to bewilder any of the youthful lecturer's well-wishers who might be anxious for some means of discriminating his +attitude from that of the Hardys, the Horne Tookes, and the Thelwalls +of the day. A little warmth of language might no doubt be allowed to a +young friend of liberty in discussing legislation which, in the +retrospect, has staggered even so staunch a Tory as Sir Archibald +Alison; but Coleridge's denunciation of the Pitt and Grenville Acts, in +the lecture entitled <i>The Plot Discovered</i>, is occasionally +startling, even for that day of fierce passions, in the fierceness of +its language. It is interesting, however, to note the ever-active play +of thought and reasoning amid the very storm and stress of political +passion. Coleridge is never for long together a mere declaimer on +popular rights and ministerial tyranny, and even this indignant address +contains a passage of extremely just and thoughtful analysis of the +constituent elements of despotism. Throughout the spring and summer of +1795 Coleridge continued his lectures at Bristol, his head still +simmering – though less violently, it may be suspected, every month – +with Pantisocracy, and certainly with all his kindred political and +religious enthusiasms unabated.</p> + +<p>A study of these crude but vigorous addresses reveals to us, as does +the earlier of the early poems, a mind struggling with its half-formed +and ever-changing conceptions of the world, and, as is usual at such +peculiar phases of an intellectual development, affirming its temporary +beliefs with a fervour and vehemence directly proportioned to the +recency of their birth. Commenting on the <i>Conciones ad Populum</i> +many years afterwards, and invoking them as witnesses to his political +consistency as an author, Coleridge remarked that with the exception of +"two or three pages involving the doctrine of philosophical necessity +and Unitarianism," he saw little or nothing in these outbursts of his +youthful zeal to retract, and, with the exception of "some flame-coloured epithets" applied to persons, as to Mr. Pitt and others, "or +rather to personifications" – for such, he says, they really were to +him – as little to regret.</p> + +<p>We now, however, arrive at an event, important in the life of every +man, and which influenced that of Coleridge to an extent not the less +certainly extraordinary because difficult, if not impossible, to define +with exactitude. On the 4th of October 1795 Coleridge was married at +St. Mary Redcliffe Church, Bristol, to Sarah (or as he preferred to +spell it Sara) Fricker, and withdrew for a time from the eager +intellectual life of a political lecturer to the contemplative quiet +appropriate to the honeymoon of a poet, spent in a sequestered cottage +amid beautiful scenery, and within sound of the sea. No wonder that +among such surroundings, and with such belongings, the honeymoon should +have extended from one month to three, and indeed that Coleridge should +have waited till his youthful yearnings for a life of action, and +perhaps (though that would have lent itself less gracefully to his poem +of farewell to his Clevedon cottage) his increasing sense of the +necessity of supplementing the ambrosia of love with the bread and +cheese of mortals, compelled him to re-enter the world. No wonder he +should have delayed to do so, for it is as easy to perceive in his +poems that these were days of unclouded happiness as it is melancholy +to reflect by how few others like them his life was destined to be +brightened. The <i>Æolian Harp</i> has no more than the moderate +merits, with its full share of the characteristic faults, of his +earlier productions; but one cannot help "reading into it" the poet's +after-life of disappointment and disillusion – estrangement from the +"beloved woman" in whose affection he was then reposing; decay and +disappearance of those "flitting phantasies" with which he was then so +joyously trifling, and the bitterly ironical scholia which fate was +preparing for such lines as</p> + +<p class="verse"> "And tranquil muse upon tranquillity."</p> + +<p>One cannot in fact refrain from mentally comparing the <i>'olian +Harp</i> of 1795 with the <i>Dejection</i> of 1803, and no one who has +thoroughly felt the spirit of both poems can make that comparison +without emotion. The former piece is not, as has been said, in a +literary sense remarkable. With the exception of the one point of +metrical style, to be touched on presently, it has almost no note of +poetic distinction save such as belongs of right to any simple record +of a mood which itself forms the highest poetry of the average man's +life; and one well knows whence came the criticism of that MS. note +inscribed by S. T. C. in a copy of the second edition of his early +poems, "This I think the most perfect poem I ever wrote. Bad may be the +best perhaps." One feels that the annotator might just as well have +written, "How perfect was the happiness which this poem recalls!" for +this is really all that Coleridge's eulogium, with its touching bias +from the hand of memory, amounts to.</p> + +<p>It has become time, however, to speak more generally of Coleridge's +early poems. The peaceful winter months of 1795-96 were in all +likelihood spent in arranging and revising the products of those poetic +impulses which had more or less actively stirred within him from his +seventeenth year upwards; and in April 1797 there appeared at Bristol a +volume of some fifty pieces entitled <i>Poems on Various Subjects, by +S. T. Coleridge, late of Jesus College Cambridge</i>. It was published +by his friend Cottle, who, in a mixture of the generous with the +speculative instinct, had given him thirty guineas for the copyright. +Its contents are of a miscellaneous kind, consisting partly of rhymed +irregular odes, partly of a collection of <i>Sonnets on Eminent +Characters</i>, and partly (and principally) of a blank verse poem of +several hundred lines, then, and indeed for years afterwards, regarded +by many of the poet's admirers as his masterpiece – the <i>Religious +Musings</i>. [<a href="#foot_2-1">1</a>]</p> + +<p>To the second edition of these poems, which was published in the +following year, Coleridge, at all times a candid critic (to the limited +extent to which it is possible even for the finest judges to be so) of +his own works, prefixed a preface, wherein he remarks that his poems +have been "rightly charged with a profusion of double epithets and a +general turgidness," and adds that he has "pruned the double epithets +with no sparing hand," and used his best efforts to tame the swell and +glitter both of thought and diction. "The latter fault, however, had," +he continues, "so insinuated itself into my <i>Religious Musings</i> +with such intricacy of union that sometimes I have omitted to +disentangle the weed from fear of snapping the flower." This is plain-spoken criticism, but I do not think that any reader who is competent +to pronounce judgment on the point will be inclined to deprecate its +severity. Nay, in order to get done with fault-finding as soon as +possible, it must perhaps be added that the admitted turgidness of the +poems is often something more than a mere defect of style, and that the +verse is turgid because the feeling which it expresses is exaggerated. +The "youthful bard unknown to fame" who, in the <i>Songs of the +Pixies</i>, is made to "heave the gentle misery of a sigh," is only +doing a natural thing described in ludicrously and unnaturally stilted +terms; but the young admirer of the <i>Robbers</i>, who informs +Schiller that if he were to meet him in the evening wandering in his +loftier mood "beneath some vast old tempest-swinging wood," he would +"gaze upon him awhile in mute awe" and then "weep aloud in a wild +ecstasy," endangers the reader's gravity not so much by extravagance of +diction as by over-effusiveness of sentiment. The former of these two +offences differs from the latter by the difference between "fustian" +and "gush." And there is, in fact, more frequent exception to be taken +to the character of the thought in these poems than to that of the +style. The remarkable gift of eloquence, which seems to have belonged +to Coleridge from boyhood, tended naturally to aggravate that very +common fault of young poets whose faculty of expression has outstripped +the growth of their intellectual and emotional experiences – the fault +of wordiness. Page after page of the poems of 1796 is filled with what +one cannot, on the most favourable terms, rank higher than rhetorical +commonplace; stanza after stanza falls pleasantly upon the ear without +suggesting any image sufficiently striking to arrest the eye of the +imagination, or awakening any thought sufficiently novel to lay hold +upon the mind. The <i>Æolian Harp</i> has been already referred to as a +pleasing poem, and reading it, as we must, in constant recollection of +the circumstances in which it was written, it unquestionably is so. But +in none of the descriptions either of external objects or of internal +feeling which are to be found in this and its companion piece, the +<i>Reflections on having left a Place of Retirement</i>, is there +anything which can fairly be said to elevate them above the level of +graceful verse. It is only in the region of the fantastic and +supernatural that Coleridge's imagination, as he was destined to show +by a far more splendid example two years afterwards, seems to acquire +true poetic distinction. It is in the <i>Songs of the Pixies</i> that +the young man "heaves the gentle misery of a sigh," and the sympathetic +interest of the reader of today is chilled by the too frequent +intrusion of certain abstract ladies, each preceded by her capital +letter and attended by her "adjective-in-waiting;" but, after all +deductions for the conventionalisms of "white-robed Purity," "meek-eyed +Pity," "graceful Ease," etc., one cannot but feel that the <i>Songs of +the Pixies</i> was the offspring not of a mere abundant and picturesque +vocabulary but of a true poetic fancy. It is worth far more as an +earnest of future achievement than the very unequal <i>Monody on the +Death of Chatterton</i> (for which indeed we ought to make special +allowance, as having been commenced in the author's eighteenth year), +and certainly than anything which could be quoted from the +<i>Effusions</i>, as Coleridge, unwilling to challenge comparison with +the divine Bowles, had chosen to describe his sonnets. It must be +honestly said indeed that these are, a very few excepted, among the +least satisfactory productions of any period of his poetic career. The +Coleridgian sonnet is not only imperfect in form and in marked contrast +in the frequent bathos of its close to the steady swell and climax of +Wordsworth, but, in by far the majority of instances in this volume, it +is wanting in internal weight. The "single pebble" of thought which a +sonnet should enclose is not only not neatly wrapped up in its envelope +of words, but it is very often not heavy enough to carry itself and its +covering to the mark. When it is so, its weight, as in the sonnet to +Pitt, is too frequently only another word for an ephemeral violence of +political feeling which, whether displayed on one side or the other, +cannot be expected to reproduce its effect in the minds of +comparatively passionless posterity. Extravagances, too, abound, as +when in <i>Kosciusko</i> Freedom is made to look as if, in a fit of +"wilfulness and sick despair," she had drained a mystic urn containing +all the tears that had ever found "fit channel on a Patriot's furrowed +cheek." The main difficulty of the metre, too – that of avoiding forced +rhymes – is rarely surmounted. Even in the three fine lines in the +<i>Burke</i> – -</p> + +<p class="verse"> "Thee stormy Pity and the cherished lure<br /> + Of Pomp and proud precipitance of soul,<br /> + Wildered with meteor fires" – </p> + +<p>we cannot help feeling that "lure" is extremely harsh, while the +weakness of the two concluding lines of the sonnet supplies a typical +example of the disappointment which these "effusions" so often prepare +for their readers.</p> + +<p>Enough, however, has been said of the faults of these early poems; it +remains to consider their merits, foremost among which, as might be +expected, is the wealth and splendour of their diction in these +passages, in which such display is all that is needed for the literary +ends of the moment. Over all that wide region of literature, in which +force and fervour of utterance, depth and sincerity of feeling avail, +without the nameless magic of poetry in the higher sense of the word, +to achieve the objects of the writer and to satisfy the mind of the +reader, Coleridge ranges with a free and sure footstep. It is no +disparagement to his <i>Religious Musings</i> to say that it is to this +class of literature that it belongs. Having said this, however, it must +be added that poetry of the second order has seldom risen to higher +heights of power. The faults already admitted disfigure it here and +there. We have "moon blasted Madness when he yells at midnight;" we +read of "eye-starting wretches and rapture-trembling seraphim," and the +really striking image of Ruin, the "old hag, unconquerable, huge, +Creation's eyeless drudge," is marred by making her "nurse" an +"impatient earthquake." But there is that in Coleridge's aspirations +and apostrophes to the Deity which impresses one even more profoundly +than the mere magnificence, remarkable as it is, of their rhetorical +clothing. They are touched with so penetrating a sincerity; they are so +obviously the outpourings of an awe-struck heart. Indeed, there is +nothing more remarkable at this stage of Coleridge's poetic development +than the instant elevation which his verse assumes whenever he passes +to Divine things. At once it seems to take on a Miltonic majesty of +diction and a Miltonic stateliness of rhythm. The tender but low-lying +domestic sentiment of the <i>Æolian Harp</i> is in a moment informed by +it with the dignity which marks that poem's close. Apart too from its +literary merits, the biographical interest of <i>Religious Musings</i> +is very considerable. "Written," as its title declares, but in reality, +as its length would suggest and as Mr. Cottle in fact tells us, only +<i>completed</i>, "on the Christmas eve of 1794," it gives expression +to the tumultuous emotions by which Coleridge's mind was agitated at +this its period of highest political excitement. His revolutionary +enthusiasm was now at its hottest, his belief in the infant French +Republic at its fullest, his wrath against the "coalesced kings" at its +fiercest, his contempt for their religious pretence at its bitterest. +"Thee to defend," he cries,</p> + +<p class="verse"> "Thee to defend, dear Saviour of mankind!<br /> + Thee, Lamb of God! Thee, blameless Prince of Peace!<br /> + From all sides rush the thirsty brood of war –<br /> + Austria, and that foul Woman of the North,<br /> + The lustful murderess of her wedded lord,<br /> + And he, connatural mind! whom (in their songs,<br /> + So bards of elder time had haply feigned)<br /> + Some Fury fondled in her hate to man,<br /> + Bidding her serpent hair in tortuous fold<br /> + Lick his young face, and at his mouth imbreathe<br /> + Horrible sympathy!"</p> + +<p>This is vigorous poetic invective; and the effect of such outbursts is +heightened by the rapid subsidence of the passion that inspires them +and the quick advent of a calmer mood. We have hardly turned the page +ere denunciations of Catherine and Frederick William give place to +prayerful invocations of the Supreme Being, which are in their turn the +prelude of a long and beautiful contemplative passage: "In the prim'val +age, a dateless while," etc., on the pastoral origin of human society. +It is as though some sweet and solemn strain of organ music had +succeeded to the blast of war-bugles and the roll of drums. In the +<i>Ode to the Departing Year</i>, written in the last days of 1796, +with its "prophecy of curses though I pray fervently for blessings" +upon the poet's native country, the mood is more uniform in its gloom; +and it lacks something, therefore, of those peculiar qualities which +make the <i>Religious Musings</i> one perhaps of the most pleasing of +all Coleridge's earlier productions. But it shares with the poems +shortly to be noticed what may be called the autobiographic charm. The +fresh natural emotion of a young and brilliant mind is eternally +interesting, and Coleridge's youthful Muse, with a frankness of self-disclosure which is not the less winning because at times it provokes a +smile, confides to us even the history of her most temporary moods. It +is, for instance, at once amusing and captivating to read in the latest +edition of the poems, as a footnote to the lines – </p> + +<p class="verse"> "Not yet enslaved, not wholly vile,<br /> + O Albion! O my mother isle!"</p> + +<p>the words – </p> + +<p class="verse"> "O doomed to fall, enslaved and vile – 1796."</p> + +<p>Yes; in 1796 and till the end of 1797 the poet's native country +<i>was</i> in his opinion all these dreadful things, but, directly the +mood changes, the verse alters, and to the advantage, one cannot but +think, of the beautiful and often-quoted close of the passage – </p> + +<p class="verse">"And Ocean mid his uproar wild<br /> + Speaks safety to his island child.<br /> + Hence for many a fearless age<br /> + Has social Quiet loved thy shore,<br /> + Nor ever proud invader's rage,<br /> + Or sacked thy towers or stained thy fields with gore."</p> + +<p>And whether we view him in his earlier or his later mood there is a +certain strange dignity of utterance, a singular confidence in his own +poetic mission, which forbids us to smile at this prophet of four-and-twenty who could thus conclude his menacing vaticinations: – </p> + +<p class="verse"> "Away, my soul, away!<br /> + I, unpartaking of the evil thing,<br /> + With daily prayer and daily toil<br /> + Soliciting for food my scanty soil,<br /> + Have wailed my country with a loud lament.<br /> + Now I recentre my immortal mind<br /> + In the deep Sabbath of meek self-content,<br /> + Cleansed from the vaporous passions which bedim<br /> + God's image, sister of the Seraphim."</p> + +<p>If ever the consciousness of great powers and the assurance of a great +future inspired a youth with perfect and on the whole well-warranted +fearlessness of ridicule it has surely done so here.</p> + +<p>Poetry alone, however, formed no sufficient outlet for Coleridge's +still fresh political enthusiasm – an enthusiasm which now became too +importunate to let him rest in his quiet Clevedon cottage. Was it +right, he cries in his lines of leave-taking to his home, that he +should dream away the entrusted hours "while his unnumbered brethren +toiled and bled"? The propaganda of Liberty was to be pushed forward; +the principles of Unitarianism, to which Coleridge had become a convert +at Cambridge, were to be preached. Is it too prosaic to add that what +poor Henri Murger calls the "chasse aux piecè de cent sous" was in all +probability demanding peremptorily to be resumed?</p> + +<p>Anyhow it so fell out that in the spring of the year 1796 Coleridge +took his first singular plunge into the unquiet waters of journalism, +instigated thereto by "sundry philanthropists and anti-polemists," +whose names he does not record, but among whom we may conjecturally +place Mr. Thomas Poole of Stowey, with whom he had formed what was +destined to be one of the longest and closest friendships of his life. +Which of the two parties – the advisers or the advised – was responsible +for the general plan of this periodical and for the arrangements for +its publication is unknown; but one of these last-mentioned details is +enough to indicate that there could have been no "business head" among +them. Considering that the motto of the <i>Watchman</i> declared the +object of its issue to be that "all might know the truth, and that the +truth might make them free," it is to be presumed that the promoters of +the scheme were not unwilling to secure as many subscribers as possible +for their sheet of "thirty-two pages, large octavo, closely printed, +price only fourpence." In order, however, to exempt it from the stamp-tax, and with the much less practical object of making it "contribute +as little as possible to the supposed guilt of a war against freedom," +it was to be published on every eighth day, so that the week-day of its +appearance would of course vary with each successive week – an +arrangement as ingeniously calculated to irritate and alienate its +public as any perhaps that the wit of man could have devised. So, +however, it was to be, and accordingly with "a naming prospectus, +'Knowledge is Power,' to cry the state of the political atmosphere," +Coleridge set off on a tour to the north, from Bristol to Sheffield, +for the purpose of procuring customers, preaching Unitarian sermons by +the way in most of the great towns, "as an hireless volunteer in a blue +coat and white waistcoat that not a rag of the woman of Babylon might +be seen on me." How he sped upon his mission is related by him with +infinite humour in the <i>Biographia Literaria</i>. He opened the +campaign at Birmingham upon a Calvinist tallow-chandler, who, after +listening to half an hour's harangue, extending from "the captivity of +the nations" to "the near approach of the millennium," and winding up +with a quotation describing the latter "glorious state" out of the +<i>Religious Musings</i>, inquired what might be the cost of the new +publication. Deeply sensible of "the anti-climax, the abysmal bathos" +of the answer, Coleridge replied, "Only fourpence, each number to be +published every eighth day," upon which the tallow-chandler observed +doubtfully that that came to "a deal of money at the end of the year." +What determined him, however, to withhold his patronage was not the +price of the article but its quantity, and not the deficiency of that +quantity but its excess. Thirty-two pages, he pointed out, was more +than he ever read all the year round, and though "as great a one as any +man in Brummagem for liberty and truth, and them sort of things, he +begged to be excused." Had it been possible to arrange for supplying +him with sixteen pages of the paper for twopence, a bargain might no +doubt have been struck; but he evidently had a business-like repugnance +to anything in the nature of "over-trading." Equally unsuccessful was a +second application made at Manchester to a "stately and opulent +wholesale dealer in cottons," who thrust the prospectus into his pocket +and turned his back upon the projector, muttering that he was "overrun +with these articles." This, however, was Coleridge's last attempt at +canvassing. His friends at Birmingham persuaded him to leave that work +to others, their advice being no doubt prompted, in part at least, by +the ludicrous experience of his qualifications as a canvasser which the +following incident furnished them. The same tradesman who had +introduced him to the patriotic tallow-chandler entertained him at +dinner, and, after the meal, invited his guest to smoke a pipe with him +and "two or three other <i>illuminati</i> of the same rank." The +invitation was at first declined on the plea of an engagement to spend +the evening with a minister and his friends, and also because, writes +Coleridge, "I had never smoked except once or twice in my lifetime, and +then it was herb-tobacco mixed with Oronooko." His host, however, +assured him that the tobacco was equally mild, and "seeing, too, that +it was of a yellow colour," he took half a pipe of it, "filling the +lower half of the bowl," for some unexplained reason, "with salt." He +was soon, however, compelled to resign it "in consequence of a +giddiness and distressful feeling" in his eyes, which, as he had drunk +but a single glass of ale, he knew must have been the effect of the +tobacco. Deeming himself recovered after a short interval, he sallied +forth to fulfil the evening's engagement; but the symptoms returned +with the walk and the fresh air, and he had scarcely entered the +minister's drawing-room and opened a packet of letters awaiting him +there than he "sank back on the sofa in a sort of swoon rather than +sleep." Fortunately he had had time to inform his new host of the +confused state of his feelings and of its occasion; for "here and thus +I lay," he continues, "my face like a wall that is whitewashing, +deathly pale, and with the cold drops of perspiration running down it +from my forehead; while one after another there dropped in the +different gentlemen who had been invited to meet and spend the evening +with me, to the number of from fifteen to twenty. As the poison of +tobacco acts but for a short time, I at length awoke from insensibility +and looked round on the party, my eyes dazzled by the candles, which +had been lighted in the interim. By way of relieving my embarrassment +one of the gentlemen began the conversation with: 'Have you seen a +paper to-day, Mr. Coleridge?' 'Sir,' I replied, rubbing my eyes, 'I am +far from convinced that a Christian is permitted to read either +newspapers or any other works of merely political and temporary +interest.'" The incongruity of this remark, with the purpose for which +the speaker was known to have visited Birmingham, and to assist him in +which the company had assembled, produced, as was natural, "an +involuntary and general burst of laughter," and the party spent, we are +told, a most delightful evening. Both then and afterwards, however, +they all joined in dissuading the young projector from proceeding with +his scheme, assuring him "in the most friendly and yet most flattering +expressions" that the employment was neither fit for him nor he for the +employment. They insisted that at any rate "he should make no more +applications in person, but carry on the canvass by proxy," a +stipulation which we may well believe to have been prompted as much by +policy as by good nature. The same hospitable reception, the same +dissuasion, and, that failing, the same kind exertions on his behalf, +he met with at Manchester, Derby, Nottingham, and every other place he +visited; and the result of his tour was that he returned with nearly a +thousand names on the subscription list of the <i>Watchman</i>, +together with "something more than a half conviction that prudence +dictated the abandonment of the scheme." Nothing but this, however, was +needed to induce him to persevere with it. To know that a given course +of conduct was the dictate of prudence was a sort of presumptive proof +to him at this period of life that the contrary was the dictate of +duty. In due time, or rather out of due time, – for the publication of +the first number was delayed beyond the day announced for it, – the +<i>Watchman</i> appeared. Its career was brief – briefer, indeed, than +it need have been. A naturally short life was suicidally shortened. In +the second number, records Coleridge, with delightful <i>naïveté</i>, +"an essay against fast-days, with a most censurable application of a +text from Isaiah [<a href="#foot_2-2">2</a>] for its motto, lost me near five hundred +subscribers at one blow." In the two following numbers he made enemies +of all his Jacobin and democratic patrons by playing Balaam to the +legislation of the Government, and pronouncing something almost like a +blessing on the "gagging bills" – measures he declared which, "whatever +the motive of their introduction, would produce an effect to be desired +by all true friends of freedom, as far as they should contribute to +deter men from openly declaiming on subjects the principles of which +they had never bottomed, and from pleading to the poor and ignorant +instead of pleading for them." At the same time the editor of the +<i>Watchman</i> avowed his conviction that national education and a +concurring spread of the Gospel were the indispensable conditions of +any true political amelioration. We can hardly wonder on the whole that +by the time the seventh number was published its predecessors were +being "exposed in sundry old iron shops at a penny a piece."</p> + +<p>And yet, like everything which came from Coleridge's hand, this +immature and unpractical production has an interest of its own. Amid +the curious mixture of actuality and abstract disquisition of which +each number of the <i>Watchman</i> is made up, we are arrested again +and again by some striking metaphor or some weighty sentence which +tells us that the writer is no mere wordy wielder of a facile pen. The +paper on the slave trade in the seventh number is a vigorous and, in +places, a heart-stirring appeal to the humane emotions. There are +passages in it which foreshadow Coleridge's more mature literary +manner – the manner of the great pulpit orators of the seventeenth +century – in a very interesting way. [<a href="#foot_2-3">3</a>] But what was the use of No. IV +containing an effective article like this when No. III. had opened with +an "Historical Sketch of the Manners and Religion of the Ancient +Germans, introductory to a sketch of the Manners, Religion, and +Politics of present Germany"? This to a public who wanted to read about +Napoleon and Mr. Pitt! No. III. in all probability "choked off" a good +proportion of the commonplace readers who might have been well content +to have put up with the humanitarian rhetoric of No. IV., if only for its +connection with so unquestionable an actuality as West Indian sugar. It +was, anyhow, owing to successive alienations of this kind that on +13th May 1796 the editor of the <i>Watchman</i> was compelled to bid +farewell to his few remaining readers in the tenth number of his +periodical, for the "short and satisfactory" reason that "the work does +not pay its expenses." "Part of my readers," continues Coleridge, +"relinquished it because it did not contain sufficient original +composition, and a still larger part because it contained too much;" +and he then proceeds with that half-humorous simplicity of his to +explain what excellent reasons there were why the first of these +classes should transfer their patronage to Flower's <i>Cambridge +Intelligencer</i>, and the second theirs to the <i>New Monthly +Magazine</i>.</p> + +<p>It is not, however, for the biographer or the world to regret the short +career of the <i>Watchman</i>, since its decease left Coleridge's mind +in undivided allegiance to the poetic impulse at what was destined to +be the period of its greatest power. In the meantime one result of the +episode had been to make a not unimportant addition to his friendships. +Mention has already been made of his somewhat earlier acquaintance with +Mr. Thomas Poole of Nether Stowey, a man of high intelligence and mark +in his time; and it was in the course of his northern peregrinations in +search of subscribers that he met with Charles Lloyd. This young man, +the son of an eminent Birmingham banker, was so struck with Coleridge's +genius and eloquence as to conceive an "ardent desire to domesticate +himself permanently with a man whose conversation was to him as a +revelation from heaven;" and shortly after the decease of the +<i>Watchman</i> he obtained his parents' consent to the arrangement.</p> + +<p>Early, therefore, in the year 1797 Coleridge, accompanied by Charles +Lloyd, removed to Nether Stowey in Somersetshire, where he occupied a +cottage placed at his disposal by Mr. Poole. His first employment in +his new abode appears to have been the preparation of the second +edition of his poems. In the new issue nineteen pieces of the former +publication were discarded and twelve new ones added, the most +important of which was the <i>Ode to the Departing Year</i>, which had +first appeared in the <i>Cambridge Intelligencer</i>, and had been +immediately afterwards republished in a separate form as a thin quarto +pamphlet, together with some lines of no special merit "addressed to a +young man of fortune" (probably Charles Lloyd), "who abandoned himself +to an indolent and causeless melancholy." To the new edition were added +the preface already quoted from, and a prose introduction to the +sonnets. The volume also contained some poems by Charles Lloyd and an +enlarged collection of sonnets and other pieces by Charles Lamb, the +latter of whom about the time of its publication paid his first visit +to the friend with whom, ever since leaving Christ's Hospital, he had +kept up a constant and, to the student of literature, a most +interesting correspondence. [<a href="#foot_2-4">4</a>] In June 1797 Charles and Mary Lamb +arrived at the Stowey cottage to find their host disabled by an +accident which prevented him from walking during their whole stay. It +was during their absence on a walking expedition that he composed the +pleasing lines – </p> + +<p class='verse'> "The lime-tree bower my prison,"</p> + +<p>in which he thrice applies to his friend that epithet which gave such +humorous annoyance to the "gentle-hearted Charles." [<a href="#foot_2-5">5</a>]</p> + +<p>But a greater than Lamb, if one may so speak without offence to the +votaries of that rare humorist and exquisite critic, had already made +his appearance on the scene. Some time before this visit of Lamb's to +Stowey Coleridge had made the acquaintance of the remarkable man who +was destined to influence his literary career in many ways importantly, +and in one way decisively. It was in the month of June 1797, and at the +village of Racedown in Dorsetshire, that he first met William +Wordsworth.</p> + +<blockquote style="font-variant: small-caps"><strong>Footnotes</strong></blockquote> + +<p><a name="foot_2-1"></a>1. The volume contained also three sonnets by Charles Lamb, one of +which was destined to have a somewhat curious history.</p> + +<p><a name="foot_2-2"></a>2. "Wherefore my bowels shall sound like an harp." – Is. xvi. 11.</p> + +<p><a name="foot_2-3"></a>3. Take for instance this sentence: "Our own sorrows, like the Princes +of Hell in Milton's Pandemonium, sit enthroned 'bulky and vast;' while +the miseries of our fellow-creatures dwindle into pigmy forms, and are +crowded in an innumerable multitude into some dark corner of the +heart." Both in character of imagery and in form of structure we have +here the germ of such passages as this which one might confidently defy +the most accomplished literary "taster" to distinguish from Jeremy +Taylor: "Or like two rapid streams that at their first meeting within +narrow and rocky banks mutually strive to repel each other, and +intermix reluctantly and in tumult, but soon finding a wider channel +and more yielding shores, blend and dilate and flow on in one current +and with one voice." – <i>Biog. Lit.</i> p. 155.</p> + +<p><a name="foot_2-4"></a>4. Perhaps a "correspondence" of which only one side exists may be +hardly thought to deserve that name. Lamb's letters to Coleridge are +full of valuable criticism on their respective poetical efforts. +Unfortunately in, it is somewhat strangely said, "a fit of dejection" +he destroyed all Coleridge's letters to him.</p> + +<p><a name="foot_2-5"></a>5. Lamb's Correspondence with Coleridge, Letter XXXVII.</p> + + + +<a name="chap3"></a> +<h2>Chapter III</h2> + +<blockquote>Coleridge and Wordsworth – Publication of the <i>Lyrical +Ballads</i> – The <i>Ancient Mariner</i> – The first part of +<i>Christabel</i> – Decline of Coleridge's poetic impulse-Final + review of his poetry. </blockquote> + +<p style="text-align: enter"> [1797-1799.]</p> + +<p>The years 1797 and 1798 are generally and justly regarded as the +blossoming-time of Coleridge's poetic genius. It would be scarcely an +exaggeration to say that they were even more than this, and that within +the brief period covered by them is included not only the development +of the poet's powers to their full maturity but the untimely beginnings +of their decline. For to pass from the poems written by Coleridge +within these two years to those of later origin is like passing from +among the green wealth of summer foliage into the well-nigh naked woods +of later autumn. During 1797 and 1798 the <i>Ancient Mariner</i>, the +first part of <i>Christabel</i>, the fine ode to France, the <i>Fears +in Solitude</i>, the beautiful lines entitled <i>Frost at Midnight</i>, +the <i>Nightingale</i>, the <i>Circassian Love-Chant</i>, the piece known +as <i>Love</i> from the poem of the <i>Dark Ladie</i>, and that strange +fragment <i>Kubla Khan</i>, were all of them written and nearly all +of them published; while between the last composed of these and +that swan-song of his dying Muse, the <i>Dejection</i>, of 1802, there +is but one piece to be added to the list of his greater works. This +therefore, the second part of <i>Christabel</i> (1800), may almost be +described by the picturesque image in the first part of the same poem +as</p> + +<p> "The one red leaf, the last of its clan, + Hanging so light and hanging so high, + On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky."</p> + +<p>The first to fail him of his sources of inspiration was his +revolutionary enthusiasm; and the ode to France – the <i>Recantation</i>, +as it was styled on its first appearance in the <i>Morning Post</i> – is the +record of a reaction which, as has been said, was as much speedier in +Coleridge's case than in that of the other ardent young minds which had +come under the spell of the Revolution as his enthusiasm had been more +passionate than theirs. In the winter of 1797-98 the Directory had +plunged France into an unnatural conflict with her sister Republic of +Switzerland, and Coleridge, who could pardon and had pardoned her +fierce animosity against a country which he considered not so much his +own as Pitt's, was unable to forgive her this. In the <i>Recantation</i> +he casts her off for ever; he perceives at last that true liberty is not +to be obtained through political, but only through spiritual emancipation; +that – </p> + +<p> "The sensual and the dark rebel in vain, + Slaves by their own compulsion! In mad game + They burst their manacles, and wear the name + Of Freedom graven on a heavier chain";</p> + +<p>and arrives in a noble peroration at the somewhat unsatisfactory +conclusion, that the spirit of liberty, "the guide of homeless winds +and playmate of the waves," is to be found only among the elements, and +not in the institutions of man. And in the same quaintly ingenuous +spirit which half touches and half amuses us in his earlier poems he +lets us perceive a few weeks later, in his <i>Fears in Solitude</i>, +that sympathy with a foreign nation threatened by the invader may +gradually develop into an almost filial regard for one's own similarly +situated land. He has been deemed, he says, an enemy of his country.</p> + +<p> "But, O dear Britain! O my mother Isle,"</p> + +<p>once, it may be remembered, "doomed to fall enslaved and vile," but +now – </p> + +<p> "Needs must them prove a name most dear and holy, + To me a son, a brother, and a friend, + A husband and a father! who revere + All bonds of natural love, and find them all + Within the limits of thy rocky shores."</p> + +<p>After all, it has occurred to him, England is not only the England of +Pitt and Grenville, and in that capacity the fitting prey of the +insulted French Republic: she is also the England of Sara Coleridge, +and little Hartley, and of Mr. Thomas Poole of Nether Stowey. And so, +to be sure, she was in 1796 when her downfall was predicted, and in the +spirit rather of the Old Testament than of the New. But there is +something very engaging in the candour with which the young poet +hastens to apprise us of this his first awakening to the fact.</p> + +<p><i>France</i> may be regarded as the last ode, and <i>Fears in +Solitude</i> as the last blank-verse poem of any importance, that owe +their origin to Coleridge's early political sentiments. Henceforth, and +for the too brief period of his poetic activity, he was to derive his +inspiration from other sources. The most fruitful and important of +these was unquestionably his intercourse with Wordsworth, from whom, +although there was doubtless a reciprocation of influence between +them, his much more receptive nature took a far deeper impression than +it made. [<a href="#foot_3-1">1</a>] At the time of their meeting he had already for some three +years been acquainted with Wordsworth's works as a poet, and it speaks +highly for his discrimination that he was able to discern the great +powers of his future friend, even in work so immature in many respects +as the <i>Descriptive Sketches</i>. It was during the last year of his +residence at Cambridge that he first met with these poems, of which he +says in the <i>Biographia Literaria</i> that "seldom, if ever, was the +emergence of an original poetic genius above the literary horizon more +evidently announced;" and the effect produced by this volume was +steadily enhanced by further acquaintance both with the poet and his +works. Nothing, indeed, is so honourably noticeable and even touching +in Coleridge's relation to his friend as the tone of reverence with +which, even in the days of his highest self-confidence and even almost +haughty belief in the greatness of his own poetic mission, he was +accustomed to speak of Wordsworth. A witness, to be more fully cited +hereafter, and whose testimony is especially valuable as that of one +who was by no means blind to Coleridge's early foible of self-complacency, has testified to this unbounded admiration of his brother-poet. "When," records this gentleman, "we have sometimes spoken +complimentarily to Coleridge of himself he has said that he was nothing +in comparison with Wordsworth." And two years before this, at a time +when they had not yet tested each other's power in literary +collaboration, he had written to Cottle to inform him of his +introduction to the author of "near twelve hundred lines of blank +verse, superior, I dare aver, to anything in our language which in any +way resembles it," and had declared with evident sincerity that he felt +"a little man" by Wordsworth's side.</p> + +<p>His own impression upon his new friend was more distinctively personal +in its origin. It was by Coleridge's total individuality, by the sum of +his vast and varied intellectual powers, rather than by the specific +poetic element contained in them, that Wordsworth, like the rest of the +world indeed, was in the main attracted; but it is clear enough that +this attraction was from the first most powerful. On that point we have +not only the weighty testimony of Dorothy Wordsworth, as conveyed in +her often-quoted description [<a href="#foot_3-2">2</a>] of her brother's new acquaintance, but +the still more conclusive evidence of her brother's own acts. He gave +the best possible proof of the fascination which had been exercised +over him by quitting Racedown with his sister for Alfoxden near Nether +Stowey within a few weeks of his first introduction to Coleridge, a +change of abode for which, as Miss Wordsworth has expressly recorded, +"our principal inducement was Coleridge's society."</p> + +<p>By a curious coincidence the two poets were at this time simultaneously +sickening for what may perhaps be appropriately called the "poetic +measles." They were each engaged in the composition of a five-act +tragedy, and read scenes to each other, and to each other's admiration, +from their respective dramas. Neither play was fortunate in its +immediate destiny. Wordsworth's tragedy, the <i>Borderers</i>, was +greatly commended by London critics and decisively rejected by the +management of Covent Garden. As for Coleridge, the negligent Sheridan +did not even condescend to acknowledge the receipt of his manuscript; +his play was passed from hand to hand among the Drury Lane Committee; +but not till many years afterwards did <i>Osorio</i> find its way under +another name to the footlights.</p> + +<p>For the next twelvemonth the intercourse between the two poets was +close and constant, and most fruitful in results of high moment to +English literature. It was in their daily rambles among the Quantock +Hills that they excogitated that twofold theory of the essence and +functions of poetry which was to receive such notable illustration in +their joint volume of verse, the <i>Lyrical Ballads</i>; it was during +a walk over the Quantock Hills that by far the most famous poem of that +series, the <i>Ancient Mariner</i>, was conceived and in part composed. +The publication of the <i>Lyrical Ballads</i> in the spring of the year +1798 was, indeed, an event of double significance for English poetry. +It marked an epoch in the creative life of Coleridge, and a no less +important one in the critical life of Wordsworth. In the <i>Biographia +Literaria</i> the origination of the plan of the work is thus +described: – </p> + +<p>"During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours our +conversation turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry, +the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful +adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest +of novelty by the modifying colours of the imagination. The sudden +charm which accidents of light and shade, which moonlight or sunset +diffused over a known and familiar landscape appeared to represent the +practicability of combining both. These are the poetry of nature. The +thought suggested itself (to which of us I do not recollect) that a +series of poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one the +incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural; and +the interest aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the +affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions as would naturally +accompany such situations, supposing them real.... For the second +class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life; the characters +and incidents were to be such as will be found in every village and its +vicinity where there is a meditative and feeling mind to seek after +them, or to notice them when they present themselves. In this idea +originated the plan of the <i>Lyrical Ballads</i>, in which it was +agreed that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters +supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our +inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to +procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of +disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith. Mr. +Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself, as his +object, to give the charm of novelty to things of everyday, and to +excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural by awakening the mind's +attention from the lethargy of custom and directing it to the +loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible +treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and +selfish solicitude, we have eyes which see not, ears that hear not, and +hearts which neither feel nor understand."</p> + +<p>We may measure the extent to which the poetic teaching and practice of +Wordsworth have influenced subsequent taste and criticism by noting how +completely the latter of these two functions of poetry has overshadowed +the former. To lend the charm of imagination to the real will appear to +many people to be not one function of poetry merely but its very +essence. To them it is poetry, and the only thing worthy of the name; +while the correlative function of lending the force of reality to the +imaginary will appear at best but a superior kind of metrical +romancing, or clever telling of fairy tales. Nor of course can there, +from the point of view of the highest conception of the poet's office, +be any comparison between the two. In so far as we regard poetry as +contributing not merely to the pleasure of the mind but to its health +and strength – in so far as we regard it in its capacity not only to +delight but to sustain, console, and tranquillise the human spirit – +there is, of course, as much difference between the idealistic and the +realistic forms of poetry as there is between a narcotic potion and a +healing drug. The one, at best, can only enable a man to forget his +burdens; the other fortifies him to endure them. It is perhaps no more +than was naturally to be expected of our brooding and melancholy age, +that poetry (when it is not a mere voluptuous record of the subjective +impressions of sense) should have become almost limited in its very +meaning to the exposition of the imaginative or spiritual aspect of the +world of realities; but so it is now, and so in Coleridge's time it +clearly was <i>not</i>. Coleridge, in the passage above quoted, shows +no signs of regarding one of the two functions which he attributes to +poetry as any more accidental or occasional than the other; and the +fact that the realistic portion of the <i>Lyrical Ballads</i> so far +exceeded in amount its supernatural element, he attributes not to any +inherent supremacy in the claims of the former to attention but simply +to the greater industry which Wordsworth had displayed in his special +department of the volume. For his own part, he says, "I wrote the +<i>Ancient Mariner</i>, and was preparing, among other poems, the +<i>Dark Ladie</i> and the <i>Christabel</i>, in which I should have more +nearly realised my ideal than I had done in my first attempt. But +Mr. Wordsworth's industry had proved so much more successful, and the +number of the poems so much greater, that my compositions, instead of +forming a balance, appeared rather an interpolation of heterogeneous +matter." There was certainly a considerable disparity between the +amount of their respective contributions to the volume, which, in fact, +contained nineteen pieces by Wordsworth and only four by Coleridge. +Practically, indeed, we may reduce this four to one; for, of the three +others, the two scenes from <i>Osorio</i> are without special distinction, +and the <i>Nightingale</i>, though a graceful poem, and containing +an admirably-studied description of the bird's note, is too +slight and short to claim any importance in the series. But the one +long poem which Coleridge contributed to the collection is alone +sufficient to associate it for ever with his name. <i>Unum sed +leonem.</i> To any one who should have taunted him with the comparative +infertility of his Muse he might well have returned the haughty answer +of the lioness in the fable, when he could point in justification of it +to the <i>Rime of the Ancient Marinere</i>.</p> + +<p>There is, I may assume, no need at the present day to discuss the true +place in English literature of this unique product of the human +imagination. One is bound, however, to attempt to correlate and adjust +it to the rest of the poet's work, and this, it must be admitted, is a +most difficult piece of business. Never was there a poem so irritating +to a critic of the "pigeon-holing" variety. It simply defies him; and +yet the instinct which he obeys is so excusable, because in fact so +universal, that one feels guilty of something like disloyalty to the +very principles of order in smiling at his disappointment. Complete and +symmetrical classification is so fascinating an amusement; it would +simplify so many subjects of study, if men and things would only +consent to rank themselves under different categories, and remain +there; it would, in particular, be so inexpressibly convenient to be +able to lay your hand upon your poet whenever you wanted him by merely +turning to a shelf labelled "Realistic" or "Imaginative" (nay, perhaps, +to the still greater saving of labour – Objective or Subjective), that +we cannot be surprised at the strength of the aforesaid instinct in +many a critical mind. Nor should it be hard to realise its revolt +against those single exceptions which bring its generalisations to +nought. When the pigeon-hole will admit every "document" but one, the +case is hard indeed; and it is not too much to say that the <i>Ancient +Mariner</i> is the one document which the pigeon-hole in this instance +declines to admit. If Coleridge had only refrained from writing this +remarkable poem, or if, having done so, he had written more poems like +it, the critic might have ticketed him with a quiet mind, and gone on +his way complacent. As it is, however, the poet has contrived in virtue +of this performance not only to defeat classification but to defy it. +For the weird ballad abounds in those very qualities in which +Coleridge's poetry with all its merits is most conspicuously deficient, +while on the other hand it is wholly free from the faults with which he +is most frequently and justly chargeable. One would not have said in +the first place that the author of <i>Religious Musings</i>, still less +of the <i>Monody on the Death of Chatterton</i>, was by any means the +man to have compassed triumphantly at the very first attempt the +terseness, vigour, and <i>naïveté</i> of the true ballad-manner. To +attain this, Coleridge, the student of his early verse must feel, would +have rather more to retrench and much more to restrain than might be +the case with many other youthful poets. The exuberance of immaturity, +the want of measure, the "not knowing where to stop," are certainly +even more conspicuous in the poems of 1796 than they are in most +productions of the same stage of poetic development; and these +qualities, it is needless to say, require very stern chastening from +him who would succeed in the style which Coleridge attempted for the +first time in the <i>Ancient Mariner</i>.</p> + +<p>The circumstances of this immortal ballad's birth have been related +with such fulness of detail by Wordsworth, and Coleridge's own +references to them are so completely reconcilable with that account, +that it must have required all De Quincey's consummate ingenuity as a +mischief-maker to detect any discrepancy between the two.</p> + +<p>In the autumn of 1797, records Wordsworth in the MS. notes which he +left behind him, "Mr. Coleridge, my sister, and myself started from +Alfoxden pretty late in the afternoon with a view to visit Linton and +the Valley of Stones near to it; and as our united funds were very +small, we agreed to defray the expense of the tour by writing a poem to +be sent to the <i>New Monthly Magazine</i>. Accordingly we set off, and +proceeded along the Quantock Hills towards Watchet; and in the course +of this walk was planned the poem of the <i>Ancient Mariner</i>, +founded on a dream, as Mr. Coleridge said, of his friend Mr. +Cruikshank. Much the greatest part of the story was Mr. Coleridge's +invention, but certain parts I suggested; for example, some crime was +to be committed which should bring upon the Old Navigator, as Coleridge +afterwards delighted to call him, the spectral persecution, as a +consequence of that crime and his own wanderings. I had been reading in +Shelvocke's <i>Voyages</i>, a day or two before, that while doubling +Cape Horn they frequently saw albatrosses in that latitude, the largest +sort of sea-fowl, some extending their wings twelve or thirteen feet. +'Suppose,' said I, 'you represent him as having killed one of these +birds on entering the South Sea, and that the tutelary spirits of these +regions take upon them to avenge the crime.' The incident was thought +fit for the purpose, and adopted accordingly. I also suggested the +navigation of the ship by the dead men, but do not recollect that I had +anything more to do with the scheme of the poem. The gloss with which +it was subsequently accompanied was not thought of by either of us at +the time, at least not a hint of it was given to me, and I have no +doubt it was a gratuitous afterthought. We began the composition +together on that to me memorable evening. I furnished two or three +lines at the beginning of the poem, in particular – </p> + +<p class="verse"> "'And listened like a three years' child:<br /> + The Mariner had his will.'</p> + +<p>"These trifling contributions, all but one, which Mr. C. has with +unnecessary scrupulosity recorded,[<a href="#foot_3-3">3</a>] slipped out of his mind, as they +well might. As we endeavoured to proceed conjointly (I speak of the +same evening) our respective manners proved so widely different that it +would have been quite presumptuous in me to do anything but separate +from an undertaking upon which I could only have been a clog.... The +<i>Ancient Mariner</i> grew and grew till it became too important for +our first object, which was limited to our expectation of five pounds; +and we began to think of a volume which was to consist, as Mr. +Coleridge has told the world, of poems chiefly on supernatural +subjects." Except that the volume ultimately determined on was to +consist only "partly" and not "chiefly" of poems on supernatural +subjects (in the result, as has been seen, it consisted "chiefly" of +poems upon natural subjects), there is nothing in this account which +cannot be easily reconciled with the probable facts upon which De +Quincey bases his hinted charge against Coleridge in his <i>Lake +Poets</i>. It was not Coleridge who had been reading Shelvocke's +<i>Voyages</i>, but Wordsworth, and it is quite conceivable, therefore, +that the source from which his friend had derived the idea of the +killing of the albatross may (if indeed he was informed of it at the +time) have escaped his memory twelve years afterwards, when the +conversation with De Quincey took place. Hence, in "disowning his +obligations to Shelvocke," he may not by any means have intended to +suggest that the albatross incident was his own thought. Moreover, De +Quincey himself supplies another explanation of the matter, which we +know, from the above-quoted notes of Wordsworth's, to be founded upon +fact. "It is possible," he adds, "from something which Coleridge said +on another occasion, that before meeting a fable in which to embody his +ideas he had meditated a poem on delirium, confounding its own dream-scenery with external things, and connected with the imagery of high +latitudes." Nothing, in fact, would be more natural than that +Coleridge, whose idea of the haunted seafarer was primarily suggested +by his friend's dream, and had no doubt been greatly elaborated in his +own imagination before being communicated to Wordsworth at all, should +have been unable, after a considerable lapse of time, to distinguish +between incidents of his own imagining and those suggested to him by +others. And, in any case, the "unnecessary scrupulosity," rightly +attributed to him by Wordsworth with respect to this very poem, is +quite incompatible with any intentional denial of obligations.</p> + +<p>Such, then, was the singular and even prosaic origin of the <i>Ancient +Mariner</i> – a poem written to defray the expenses of a tour; surely +the most sublime of "pot-boilers" to be found in all literature. It is +difficult, from amid the astonishing combination of the elements of +power, to select that which is the most admirable; but, considering +both the character of the story and of its particular vehicle, perhaps +the greatest achievement of the poem is the simple realistic force of +its narrative. To achieve this was of course Coleridge's main object: +he had undertaken to "transfer from our inward nature a human interest +and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of +imaginations that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which +constitutes poetic faith." But it is easier to undertake this than to +perform it, and much easier to perform it in prose than in verse – with +the assistance of the everyday and the commonplace than without it. +Balzac's <i>Peau de Chagrin</i> is no doubt a great feat of the +realistic-supernatural; but no one can help feeling how much the author +is aided by his "broker's clerk" style of description, and by the +familiar Parisian scenes among which he makes his hero move. It is +easier to compass verisimilitude in the Palais-Royal than on the South +Pacific, to say nothing of the thousand assisting touches, out of place +in rhyme and metre, which can be thrown into a prose narrative. The +<i>Ancient Mariner</i>, however, in spite of all these drawbacks, is as +real to the reader as is the hero of the <i>Peau de Chagrin</i>; we are +as convinced of the curse upon one of the doomed wretches as upon the +other; and the strange phantasmagoric haze which is thrown around the +ship and the lonely voyager leaves their outlines as clear as if we saw +them through the sunshine of the streets of Paris. Coleridge triumphs +over his difficulties by sheer vividness of imagery and terse vigour of +descriptive phrase – two qualities for which his previous poems did not +prove him to possess by any means so complete a mastery. For among all +the beauties of his earlier landscapes we can hardly reckon that of +intense and convincing truth. He seems seldom before to have written, +as Wordsworth nearly always seems to write, "with his eye on the +object;" and certainly he never before displayed any remarkable power +of completing his word-picture with a few touches. In the <i>Ancient +Mariner</i> his eye seems never to wander from his object, and again +and again the scene starts out upon the canvas in two or three strokes +of the brush. The skeleton ship, with the dicing demons on its deck; +the setting sun peering "through its ribs, as if through a dungeon-grate;" the water-snakes under the moonbeams, with the "elfish light" +falling off them "in hoary flakes" when they reared; the dead crew, who +work the ship and "raise their limbs like lifeless tools" – everything +seems to have been actually <i>seen</i>, and we believe it all as the +story of a truthful eye-witness. The details of the voyage, too, are +all chronicled with such order and regularity, there is such a diary-like air about the whole thing, that we accept it almost as if it were +a series of extracts from the ship's "log." Then again the execution – a +great thing to be said of so long a poem – is marvellously equal +throughout; the story never drags or flags for a moment, its felicities +of diction are perpetual, and it is scarcely marred by a single weak +line. What could have been better said of the instantaneous descent of +the tropical night than</p> + +<p class="verse"> "The Sun's rim dips; the stars rush out:<br /> + At one stride comes the dark;"</p> + +<p>what more weirdly imagined of the "cracks and growls" of the rending +iceberg than that they sounded "like noises in a swound"? And how +beautifully steals in the passage that follows upon the cessation of +the spirit's song – </p> + +<p class="verse"> "It ceased; yet still the sails made on<br /> + A pleasant noise till noon,<br /> + A noise like to a hidden brook<br /> + In the leafy month of June,<br /> + That to the sleeping woods all night<br /> + Singeth a quiet tune."</p> + +<p>Then, as the ballad draws to its close, after the ship has +drifted over the harbour-bar – </p> + +<p class="verse"> "And I with sobs did pray –<br /> + O let me be awake, my God;<br /> + Or let me sleep alway,"</p> + +<p>with what consummate art are we left to imagine the physical traces +which the mariner's long agony had left behind it by a method far more +terrible than any direct description – the effect, namely, which the +sight of him produces upon others – </p> + +<p class="verse"> "I moved my lips – the Pilot shrieked<br /> + And fell down in a fit; + The holy Hermit raised his eyes, + And prayed where he did sit.</p> + +<p> "I took the oars: the Pilot's boy, + <i>Who now doth crazy go</i>, + Laughed loud and long, and all the while + His eyes went to and fro. + 'Ha! ha!' quoth he, 'full plain I see, + The Devil knows how to row.'"</p> + +<p>Perfect consistency of plan, in short, and complete equality of +execution, brevity, self-restraint, and an unerring sense of artistic +propriety – these are the chief notes of the <i>Ancient Mariner</i>, as +they are <i>not</i>, in my humble judgment, the chief notes of any poem +of Coleridge's before or since. And hence it is that this masterpiece +of ballad minstrelsy is, as has been said, so confounding to the +"pigeon-holing" mind.</p> + +<p>The next most famous poem of this or indeed of any period of Coleridge's +life is the fragment of <i>Christabel</i>, which, however, in spite of +the poet's own opinion on that point, it is difficult to regard as "a +more effective realisation" of the "natural-supernatural" idea. Beautiful +as it is, it possesses none of that human interest with which, according +to this idea, the narrator of the poetic story must undertake to invest +it. Nor can the unfinished condition in which it was left be fairly held +to account for this, for the characters themselves – the lady Christabel, +the witch Geraldine, and even the baron Sir Leoline himself – are somewhat +shadowy creations, with too little hold upon life and reality, and too +much resemblance to the flitting figures of a dream. Powerful in their +way as are the lines descriptive of the spell thrown over Christabel by +her uncanny guest – lines at the recitation of which Shelley is said to +have fainted – we cannot say that they strike a reader with such a sense of +horror as should be excited by the contemplation of a real flesh-and-blood +maiden subdued by "the shrunken serpent eyes" of a sorceress, and +constrained "passively to imitate" their "look of dull and treacherous +hate." Judging it, however, by any other standard than that of the poet's +own erecting, one must certainly admit the claim of <i>Christabel</i> to +rank very high as a work of pure creative art. It is so thoroughly +suffused and permeated with the glow of mystical romance, the whole +atmosphere of the poem is so exquisitely appropriate to the subject, +and so marvellously preserved throughout, that our lack of belief in +the reality of the scenes presented to us detracts but little from the +pleasure afforded by the artistic excellence of its presentment. It +abounds, too, in isolated pictures of surpassing vividness and grace – +word-pictures which live in the "memory of the eye" with all the +wholeness and tenacity of an actual painting. Geraldine appearing to +Christabel beneath the oak, and the two women stepping lightly across +the hall "that echoes still, pass as lightly as you will," are pictures +of this kind; and nowhere out of Keats's <i>Eve of St. Agnes</i> is +there any "interior" to match that of Christabel's chamber, done as it +is in little more than half a dozen lines. These beauties, it is true, +are fragmentary, like the poem itself, but there is no reason to +believe that the poem itself would have gained anything in its +entirety – that is to say, as a poetic narrative – by completion. Its +main idea – that the purity of a pure maiden is a charm more powerful +for the protection of those dear to her than the spells of the evil one +for their destruction – had been already sufficiently indicated, and the +mode in which Coleridge, it seems, intended to have worked would hardly +have added anything to its effect. [<a href="#foot_3-4">4</a>] And although he clung till very +late in life to the belief that he <i>could</i> have finished it in +after days with no change of poetic manner – "If easy in my mind," he +says in a letter to be quoted hereafter, "I have no doubt either of the +reawakening power or of the kindling inclination" – there are few +students of his later poems who will share his confidence. Charles Lamb +strongly recommended him to leave it unfinished, and Hartley Coleridge, +in every respect as competent a judge on that point as could well be +found, always declared his conviction that his father could not, at +least <i>qualis ab incepto</i>, have finished the poem.</p> + +<p>The much-admired little piece first published in the <i>Lyrical Ballads</i> +under the title of <i>Love</i>, and probably best known by its +(original) first and most pregnant stanza, [<a href="#foot_3-5">5</a>] possesses a twofold +interest for the student of Coleridge's life and works, as illustrating +at once one of the most marked characteristics of his peculiar +temperament, and one of the most distinctive features of his poetic +manner. The lines are remarkable for a certain strange fascination of +melody – a quality for which Coleridge, who was not unreasonably proud +of his musical gift, is said to have especially prized them; and they +are noteworthy also as perhaps the fullest expression of the almost +womanly softness of Coleridge's nature. To describe their tone as +effeminate would be unfair and untrue, for effeminacy in the work of a +male hand would necessarily imply something of falsity of sentiment, +and from this they are entirely free. But it must certainly be admitted +that for a man's description of his wooing the warmth of feeling which +pervades them is as nearly sexless in character as it is possible to +conceive; and, beautiful as the verses are, one cannot but feel that +they only escape the "namby-pamby" by the breadth of a hair.</p> + +<p>As to the wild dream-poem <i>Kubla Khan</i>, it is hardly more than a +psychological curiosity, and only that perhaps in respect of the +completeness of its metrical form. For amid its picturesque but vague +imagery there is nothing which might not have presented itself, and the +like of which has not perhaps actually presented itself, to many a +half-awakened brain of far lower imaginative energy during its hours of +full daylight consciousness than that of Coleridge. Nor possibly is it +quite an unknown experience to many of us to have even a fully-written +record, so to speak, of such impressions imprinted instantaneously on +the mind, the conscious composition of whole pages of narrative, +descriptive, or cogitative matter being compressed as it were into a +moment of time. Unfortunately, however, the impression made upon the +ordinary brain is effaced as instantaneously as it is produced; the +abnormal exaltation of the creative and apprehensive power is quite +momentary, being probably indeed confined to the single moment between +sleep and waking; and the mental tablet which a second before was +covered so thickly with the transcripts of ideas and images, all far +more vivid, or imagined to be so, than those of waking life, and all +apprehended with a miraculous simultaneity by the mind, is converted +into a <i>tabula rasa</i> in the twinkling of a half-opened eye. The wonder in +Coleridge's case was that his brain retained the word-impressions +sufficiently long to enable him to commit them, to the extent at least +of some fifty odd lines, to paper, and that, according to his own +belief, this is but a mere fraction of what but for an unlucky +interruption in the work of transcribing he would have been able to +preserve. His own account of this curious incident is as follows: –</p> + +<p>"In the summer of 1797 the author, then in ill health, had retired to a +lonely farmhouse between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of +Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an +anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep +in his chair at the moment that he was reading, the following sentence, +or words of the same substance, in Purchas's <i>Pilgrimage</i>: – 'Here +the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden +thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were enclosed by a +wall.' The Author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, +at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most +vivid confidence that he could not have composed less than from two to +three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which +all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production +of the corresponding expressions, without any sensation or +consciousness of effect. On awaking he appeared to himself to have a +distinct recollection of the whole, and, taking his pen, ink, and +paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here +preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person +on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his +return to his room found, to his no small surprise and mortification, +that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the +general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or +ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the +images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, +but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter."</p> + +<p>This poem, though written in 1797, remained, like <i>Christabel</i>, in +MS. till 1816. These were then published in a thin quarto volume, together +with another piece called the <i>Pains of Sleep</i>, a composition of many +years' later date than the other two, and of which there will be +occasion to say a word or two hereafter.</p> + +<p>At no time, however, not even in this the high-tide of its activity, +was the purely poetic impulse dominant for long together in +Coleridge's mind. He was born with the instincts of the orator, and +still more with those of the teacher, and I doubt whether he ever +really regarded himself as fulfilling the true mission of his life +except at those moments when he was seeking by spoken word to exercise +direct influence over his fellow-men. At the same time, however, such +was the restlessness of his intellect, and such his instability of +purpose, that he could no more remain constant to what he deemed his +true vocation than he could to any other. This was now to be signally +illustrated. Soon after the <i>Ancient Mariner</i> was written, and +some time before the volume which was to contain it appeared, Coleridge +quitted Stowey for Shrewsbury to undertake the duties of a Unitarian +preacher in that town. This was in the month of January 1798, [<a href="#foot_3-6">6</a>] and +it seems pretty certain, though exact dates are not to be ascertained, +that he was back again at Stowey early in the month of February. In the +pages of the <i>Liberal</i> (1822) William Hazlitt has given a most +graphic and picturesque description of Coleridge's appearance and +performance in his Shrewsbury pulpit; and, judging from this, one can +well believe, what indeed was to have been antecedently expected, that +had he chosen to remain faithful to his new employment he might have +rivalled the reputation of the greatest preacher of the time. But his +friends the Wedgwoods, the two sons of the great potter, whose +acquaintance he had made a few years earlier, were apparently much +dismayed at the prospect of his deserting the library for the chapel, +and they offered him an annuity of £150 a year on condition of his +retiring from the ministry and devoting himself entirely to the study +of poetry and philosophy. Coleridge was staying at the house of +Hazlitt's father when the letter containing this liberal offer reached +him, "and he seemed," says the younger Hazlitt, "to make up his mind to +close with the proposal in the act of tying on one of his shoes." +Another inducement to so speedy an acceptance of it is no doubt to be +found in the fact of its presenting to Coleridge an opportunity for the +fulfilment of a cherished desire – that, namely, of "completing his +education," as he regarded it, by studying the German language, and +acquiring an acquaintance with the theology and philosophy of Germany +in that country itself. This prospect he was enabled, through the +generosity of the Wedgwoods, to put into execution towards the end of +1798. But before passing on from this culminating and, to all intents +and purposes, this closing year of Coleridge's career as a poet it will +be proper to attempt something like a final review of his poetic work. +Admirable as much of that work is, and unique in quality as it is +throughout, I must confess that it leaves on my own mind a stronger +impression of the unequal and imperfect than does that of any poet at +all approaching Coleridge in imaginative vigour and intellectual grasp. +It is not a mere inequality and imperfection of style like that which +so seriously detracts from the pleasure of reading Byron. Nor is it +that the thought is often <i>impar sibi</i> – that, like Wordsworth's, +it is too apt to descend from the mountain-tops of poetry to the flats +of commonplace, if not into the bogs of bathos. In both these respects +Coleridge may and does occasionally offend, but his workmanship is, on +the whole, as much more artistic than Byron's as the material of his +poetry is of more uniformly equal value than Wordsworth's. Yet, with +almost the sole exception of the <i>Ancient Mariner</i>, his work is in +a certain sense more disappointing than that of either. In spite of his +theory as to the twofold function of poetry we must finally judge that +of Coleridge, as of any other poet, by its relation to the actual. +Ancient Mariners and Christabels – the people, the scenery, and the +incidents of an imaginary world – may be handled by poetry once and +again to the wonder and delight of man; but feats of this kind cannot – +or cannot in the Western world, at any rate – be repeated indefinitely, +and the ultimate test of poetry, at least for the modern European +reader, is its treatment of actualities – its relations to the world of +human action, passion, sensation, thought. And when we try Coleridge's +poetry in any one of these four regions of life, we seem forced to +admit that, despite all its power and beauty, it at no moment succeeds +in convincing us, as at their best moments Wordsworth's and even +Byron's continually does, that the poet has found his true poetic +vocation – that he is interpreting that aspect of life which he can +interpret better than he can any other, and which no other poet, save +the one who has vanquished all poets in their own special fields of +achievement, can interpret as well as he. In no poem of actuality does +Coleridge so victoriously show himself to be the right man at the right +work as does Wordsworth in certain moods of seership and Byron in +certain moments of passion. Of them at such moods and moments we feel +assured that they have discovered where their real strength lies, and +have put it forth to the utmost. But we never feel satisfied that +Coleridge has discovered where <i>his</i> real strength lies, and he +strikes us as feeling no more certainty on the point himself. Strong as +is his pinion, his flight seems to resemble rather that of the eaglet +than of the full-grown eagle even to the last. He continues "mewing his +mighty youth" a little too long. There is a tentativeness of manner +which seems to come from a conscious aptitude for many poetic styles +and an incapacity to determine which should be definitively adopted and +cultivated to perfection. Hence one too often returns from any +prolonged ramble through Coleridge's poetry with an unsatisfied feeling +which does not trouble us on our return from the best literary country +of Byron or Wordsworth. Byron has taken us by rough roads, and +Wordsworth led us through some desperately flat and dreary lowlands to +his favourite "bits;" but we feel that we have seen mountain and +valley, wood and river, glen and waterfall at their best. But +Coleridge's poetry leaves too much of the feeling of a walk through a +fine country on a misty day. We may have had many a peep of beautiful +scenery and occasional glimpses of the sublime; but the medium of +vision has been of variable quality, and somehow we come home with an +uneasy suspicion that we have not seen as much as we might. It is +obvious, however, even upon a cursory consideration of the matter, that +this disappointing element in Coleridge's poetry is a necessary result +of the circumstances of its production; for the period of his +productive activity (at least after attaining manhood) was too short to +enable a mind with so many intellectual distractions to ascertain its +true poetic bent, and to concentrate its energies thereupon. If he +seems always to be feeling his way towards the work which he could do +best, it is for the very good reason that this is what, from 1796 to +1800, he was continually doing as a matter of fact. The various styles +which he attempted – and for a season, in each case, with such brilliant +results – are forms of poetic expression corresponding, on the face of +them, to poetic impulses of an essentially fleeting nature. The +political or politico-religious odes were the offspring of youthful +democratic enthusiasm; the supernatural poems, so to call them for want +of a better name, had their origin in an almost equally youthful and +more than equally transitory passion for the wild and wondrous. +Political disillusion is fatal to the one impulse, and mere advance in +years extinguishes the other. Visions of Ancient Mariners and +Christabels do not revisit the mature man, and the Toryism of middle +life will hardly inspire odes to anything. + +With the extinction of these two forms of creative impulse Coleridge's +poetic activity, from causes to be considered hereafter, came almost +entirely to an end, and into what later forms it might subsequently +have developed remains therefore a matter more or less of conjecture. +Yet I think there is almost a sufficiency of <i>à priori</i> evidence +as to what that form would have been. Had the poet in him survived +until years had "brought the philosophic mind," he would doubtless have +done for the human spirit, in its purely isolated self-communings, what +Wordsworth did for it in its communion with external nature. All that +the poetry of Wordsworth is for the mind which loves to hold converse +with the world of things; this, and more perhaps than this – if more be +possible – would the poetry of Coleridge have been for the mind which +abides by preference in the world of self-originating emotion and +introspective thought. Wordsworth's primary function is to interpret +nature to man: the interpretation of man to himself is with him a +secondary process only-the response, in almost every instance, to +impressions from without. This poet can nobly brace the human heart to +fortitude; but he must first have seen the leech-gatherer on the lonely +moor. The "presence and the spirit interfused" throughout creation is +revealed to us in moving and majestic words; yet the poet requires to +have felt it "in the light of setting suns and the round ocean and the +living air" before he feels it "in the mind of man." But what +Wordsworth grants only to the reader who wanders with him in +imagination by lake and mountain, the Muse of Coleridge, had she lived, +would have bestowed upon the man who has entered into his inner chamber +and shut to the door. This, it seems to me, is the work for which +genius, temperament, and intellectual habit would alike have fitted +him. For while his feeling for internal nature was undoubtedly less +profound, less mystically penetrating than Wordsworth's, his +sensibilities in general were incomparably quicker and more subtle than +those of the friend in whom he so generously recognised a master; and +the reach of his sympathies extends to forms of human emotion, to +subjects of human interest which lay altogether outside the somewhat +narrow range of Wordsworth's.</p> + +<p>And, with so magnificent a furniture of those mental and moral +qualities which should belong to "a singer of man to men," it must not +be forgotten that his technical equipment for the work was of the most +splendidly effective kind. If a critic like Mr. Swinburne seems to +speak in exaggerated praise of Coleridge's lyrics, we can well +understand their enchantment for a master of music like himself. +Probably it was the same feeling which made Shelley describe +<i>France</i> as "the finest ode in the English language." With all, in +fact, who hold – as it is surely plausible to hold – that the first duty +of a singer is to sing, the poetry of Coleridge will always be more +likely to be classed above than below its merits, great as they are. +For, if we except some occasional lapses in his sonnets – a metrical +form in which, at his best, he is quite "out of the running" with +Wordsworth – his melody never fails him. He is a singer always, as +Wordsworth is not always, and Byron almost never. The <i>'olian +Harp</i> to which he so loved to listen does not more surely respond in +music to the breeze of heaven than does Coleridge's poetic utterance to +the wind of his inspiration. Of the dreamy fascination which Love +exercises over a listening ear I have already spoken; and there is +hardly less charm in the measure and assonances of the <i>Circassian +Love Chant. Christabel</i> again, considered solely from the metrical +point of view, is a veritable <i>tour de force</i> – the very model of a +metre for romantic legend: as which, indeed, it was imitated with +sufficient grace and spirit, but seldom with anything approaching to +Coleridge's melody, by Sir Walter Scott.</p> + +<p>Endowed therefore with so glorious a gift of song, and only not fully +master of his poetic means because of the very versatility of his +artistic power and the very variety and catholicity of his youthful +sympathies, it is unhappily but too certain that the world has lost +much by that perversity of conspiring accidents which so untimely +silenced Coleridge's muse. And the loss is the more trying to posterity +because he seems, to a not, I think, too curiously considering +criticism, to have once actually struck that very chord which would +have sounded the most movingly beneath his touch, – and to have struck +it at the very moment when the failing hand was about to quit the keys +for ever.</p> + +<p> "Ostendunt terris hunc tantum fata neque ultra + Esse sinunt."</p> + +<p>I cannot regard it as merely fantastic to believe that the +<i>Dejection</i>, that dirge of infinite pathos over the grave of +creative imagination, might, but for the fatal decree which had by that +time gone forth against Coleridge's health and happiness, have been but +the cradle-cry of a new-born poetic power, in which imagination, not +annihilated but transmigrant, would have splendidly proved its vitality +through other forms of song.</p> + +<blockquote style="font-variant: small-caps"><strong>Footnotes</strong></blockquote> + +<p><a name="foot_3-1"></a>1. Perhaps the deepest impress of the Wordsworthian influence is to be +found in the little poem <i>Frost at Midnight</i>, with its affecting +apostrophe to the sleeping infant at his side – infant destined to +develop as wayward a genius and to lead as restless and irresolute a +life as his father. Its closing lines – </p> + +<p> "Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee + Whether the summer clothe the general earth + With greenness... + ... whether the eave-drops fall, + Heard only in the trances of the blast, + Or if the secret ministry of frost + Shall hang them up in silent icicles + Quietly shining to the quiet moon" – </p> + +<p>might have flowed straight from the pen of Wordsworth himself.</p> + +<p><a name="foot_3-2"></a>2. "You had a great loss in not seeing Coleridge. He is a wonderful +man. His conversation teems with soul, mind, and spirit. Then he is so +benevolent, so good tempered and cheerful, and, like William, interests +himself so much about every little trifle. At first I thought him very +plain, that is, for about three minutes; he is pale, thin, has a wide +mouth, thick lips, and not very good teeth, longish loose-growing half-curling rough black hair. But if you hear him speak for five minutes +you think no more of them. His eye is large and full, and not very dark +but gray, such an eye as would receive from a heavy soul the dullest +expression; but it speaks every emotion of his animated mind: it has +more of the poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling than I ever witnessed. +He has fine dark eyebrows and an overhanging forehead."</p> + +<p><a name="foot_3-3"></a>3. The lines – </p> + +<p> "And it is long, and lank, and brown, + As is the ribbed sea-sand."</p> + +<p><a name="foot_3-4"></a>4. Mr. Gillman (in his <i>Life</i>, p. 301) gives the following +somewhat bald outline of what were to form the two concluding cantos, +no doubt on the authority of Coleridge himself. The second canto ends, +it may be remembered, with the despatch of Bracy the bard to the castle +of Sir Roland: – "Over the mountains the Bard, as directed by Sir +Leoline, hastes with his disciple; but, in consequence of one of those +inundations supposed to be common to the country, the spot only where +the castle once stood is discovered, the edifice itself being washed +away. He determines to return. Geraldine, being acquainted with all +that is passing, like the weird sisters in <i>Macbeth</i>, vanishes. +Reappearing, however, she awaits the return of the Bard, exciting in +the meantime by her wily arts all the anger she could rouse in the +Baron's breast, as well as that jealousy of which he is described to +have been susceptible. The old bard and the youth at length arrive, and +therefore she can no longer personate the character of Geraldine, the +daughter of Lord Roland de Vaux, but changes her appearance to that of +the accepted though absent lover of Christabel. Next ensues a courtship +most distressing to Christabel, who feels – she knows not why – great +disgust for her once favoured knight. This coldness is very painful to +the Baron, who has no more conception than herself of the supernatural +transformation. She at last yields to her father's entreaties, and +consents to approach the altar with the hated suitor. The real lover +returning, enters at this moment, and produces the ring which she had +once given him in sign of her betrothment. Thus defeated, the +supernatural being Geraldine disappears. As predicted, the castle-bell +tolls, the mother's voice is heard, and, to the exceeding great joy of +the parties, the rightful marriage takes place, after which follows a +reconciliation and explanation between father and daughter."</p> + +<p><a name="foot_3-5"></a>5.</p> + +<p> "All thoughts, all passions, all delights, + Whatever stirs this mortal frame, + All are but ministers of Love, + And feed his sacred flame."</p> + +<p><a name="foot_3-6"></a>6. It may be suggested that this sudden resolution was forced upon +Coleridge by the <i>res angusta domi</i>. But I do not think that was +the case. In the winter of 1797 he had obtained an introduction to and +entered into a literary engagement with Mr. Stuart of the <i>Morning +Post</i>, and could thus have met, as in fact he afterwards did meet, +the necessities of the hour.</p> + + + +<a name="chap4"></a> +<h2>Chapter IV</h2> + +<blockquote>Visit to Germany – Life at Göttingen, – Return – Explores the Lake Country – +London – The <i>Morning Post</i> – Coleridge as a journalist – Retirement to +Keswick. </blockquote> + +<p style="text-align: center">[1799-1800.]</p> + +<p>The departure of the two poets for the Continent was delayed only till +they had seen their joint volume through the press. The <i>Lyrical +Ballads</i> appeared in the autumn of 1798, and on 16th September of +that year Coleridge left Yarmouth for Hamburg with Wordsworth and his +sister. [<a href="#foot_4-1">1</a>] The purpose of his two companions' tour is not known to +have been other than the pleasure, or mixed pleasure and instruction, +usually derivable from foreign travel; that of Coleridge was strictly, +even sternly, educational. Immediately on his arrival in Germany he +parted from the Wordsworths, who went on to Gozlar, [<a href="#foot_4-2">2</a>] and took up his +abode at the house of the pastor at Ratzeburg, with whom he spent five +months in assiduous study of the language. In January he removed to +Göttingen. Of his life here during the next few months we possess an +interesting record in the <i>Early Years and Late Reflections</i> of +Dr. Carrlyon, a book published many years after the events which it +relates, but which is quite obviously a true reflection of impressions +yet fresh in the mind of its writer when its materials were first +collected. Its principal value, in fact, is that it gives us Coleridge +from the standpoint of the average young educated Englishman of the +day, sufficiently intelligent, indeed, to be sensible of his fellow-student's transcendent abilities, but as little awed by them out of +youth's healthy irreverence of criticism as the ordinary English +undergraduate ever has been by the intellectual supremacy of any +"greatest man of his day" who might chance to have been his +contemporary at Oxford or Cambridge. In Dr. Carrlyon's reminiscences +and in the quoted letters of a certain young Parry, another of the +English student colony at Göttingen, we get a piquant picture of the +poet-philosopher of seven-and-twenty, with his yet buoyant belief in +his future, his still unquenched interest in the world of things, and +his never-to-be-quenched interest in the world of thought, his even +then inexhaustible flow of disquisition, his generous admiration for +the gifts of others, and his <i>naïve</i> complacency – including, it +would seem, a touch of the vanity of personal appearance – in his own. +"He frequently," writes Dr. Carrlyon, "recited his own poetry, and not +unfrequently led us further into the labyrinth of his metaphysical +elucidations, either of particular passages or of the original +conception of any of his productions, than we were able to follow him. +At the conclusion, for instance, of the first stanza of +<i>Christabel</i>, he would perhaps comment at full length upon such a +line as 'Tu – whit! – Tu – whoo!' that we might not fall into the mistake +of supposing originality to be its sole merit." The example is not very +happily chosen, for Coleridge could hardly have claimed "originality" +for an onomatopoeia which occurs in one of Shakspeare's best known +lyrics; but it serves well enough to illustrate the fact that he "very +seldom went right to the end of any piece of poetry; to pause and +analyse was his delight." His disappointment with regard to his tragedy +of <i>Osorio</i> was, we also learn, still fresh. He seldom, we are +told, "recited any of the beautiful passages with which it abounds +without a visible interruption of the perfect composure of his mind." +He mentioned with great emotion Sheridan's inexcusable treatment of him +with respect to it. At the same time, adds his friend, "he is a severe +critic of his own productions, and declares" (this no doubt with +reference to his then, and indeed his constant estimate of +<i>Christabel</i> as his masterpiece) "that his best poems have perhaps +not appeared in print."</p> + +<p>Young Parry's account of his fellow-student is also fresh and pleasing. +"It is very delightful," he tells a correspondent, "to hear him sometimes +discourse on religious topics for an hour together. His fervour is +particularly agreeable when compared with the chilling speculations of +German philosophers," whom Coleridge, he adds, "successively forced to +abandon all their strongholds." He is "much liked, notwithstanding many +peculiarities. He is very liberal towards all doctrines and opinions, +and cannot be put out of temper. These circumstances give him the +advantage of his opponents, who are always bigoted and often irascible. +Coleridge is an enthusiast on many subjects, and must therefore appear +to many to possess faults, and no doubt he has faults, but he has a +good heart and a large mass of information with," as his fellow-student +condescendingly admits, "superior talents. The great fault which his +friends may lament is the variety of subjects which he adopts, and the +abstruse nature of his ordinary speculations, <i>extra homines podtas</i>. +They can easily," concludes the writer, rising here to the full +stateliness of youth's epistolary style, "they can easily excuse his +devoted attachment to his country, and his reasoning as to the means of +producing the greatest human happiness, but they do not universally +approve the mysticism of his metaphysics and the remoteness of his +topics from human comprehension."</p> + +<p>In the month of May 1799 Coleridge set out with a party of his fellow-students on a walking tour through the Harz Mountains, an excursion +productive of much oral philosophising on his part, and of the +composition of the <i>Lines on ascending the Brocken</i>, not one of the +happiest efforts of his muse. As to the philosophising, "he never," says +one of his companions on this trip, "appeared to tire of mental exercise; +talk seemed to him a perennial pastime, and his endeavours to inform and +amuse us ended only with the cravings of hunger or the fatigue of a long +march, from which neither his conversational powers nor his stoicism +could protect himself or us." It speaks highly for the matter of +Coleridge's allocutions that such incessant outpourings during a +mountaineering tramp appear to have left no lasting impression of +boredom behind them. The holiday seems to have been thoroughly enjoyed +by the whole party, and Coleridge, at any rate, had certainly earned +it. For once, and it is almost to be feared for the last time in his +life, he had resisted his besetting tendency to dispersiveness, and +constrained his intelligence to apply itself to one thing at a time. +He had come to Germany to acquire the language, and to learn what of +German theology and metaphysics he might find worth the study, and his +five months' steady pursuit of the former object had been followed by +another four months of resolute prosecution of the latter. He attended +the lectures of Professor Blumenbach, and obtained through a fellow-student notes from those of Eichhorn. He suffered no interruption in +his studies, unless we are to except a short visit from Wordsworth +and his sister, who had spent most of their stay abroad in residence +at Gozlar; and he appears, in short, to have made in every way the best +use of his time. On 24th June 1799 he gave his leave-taking supper at +Göttingen, replying to the toast of his health in fluent German but +with an execrable accent; and the next day presumably he started on his +homeward journey.</p> + +<p>His movements for the next few months are incorrectly stated in most of +the brief memoirs prefixed to the various editions of the poet's works, + – their writers having, it is to be imagined, accepted without +examination a misplaced date of Mr. Gillman's. It is not the fact that +Coleridge "returned to England after an absence of fourteen months, and +arrived in London the 27th of November." His absence could not have +lasted longer than a year, for we know from the evidence of Miss +Wordsworth's diary that he was exploring the Lake country (very likely +for the first time) in company with her brother and herself in the month +of September 1799. The probability is that he arrived in England early +in July, and immediately thereupon did the most natural and proper thing +to be done under the circumstances – namely, returned to his wife and +children at Nether Stowey, and remained there for the next two months, +after which he set off with the Wordsworths, then still at Alfoxden, to +visit the district to which the latter had either already resolved upon, +or were then contemplating, the transfer of their abode. The 27th of +November is no doubt the correct date of his arrival in London, though not +"from abroad." And his first six weeks in the metropolis were spent in a +very characteristic fashion – in the preparation, namely, of a work which +he pronounced with perfect accuracy to be destined to fall dead from the +press. He shut himself up in a lodging in Buckingham Street, Strand, +and by the end of the above-mentioned period he had completed his +admirable translation of <i>Wallenstein</i>, in itself a perfect, and +indeed his most perfect dramatic poem. The manuscript of this English +version of Schiller's drama was purchased by Messrs. Longman under the +condition that the translation and the original should appear at the +same time. Very few copies were sold, and the publishers, indifferent +to Coleridge's advice to retain the unsold copies until the book should +become fashionable, disposed of them as waste paper. Sixteen years +afterwards, on the publication of <i>Christabel</i>, they were eagerly +sought for, and the few remaining copies doubled their price. It was +while engaged upon this work that he formed that connection with +political jouralism which lasted, though with intermissions, throughout +most of the remainder of his life. His early poetical pieces had, as we +have seen, made their first appearance in the <i>Morning Post</i>, but +hitherto that newspaper had received no prose contribution from his +pen. His engagement with its proprietor, Mr. Daniel Stuart, to whom he +had been introduced during a visit to London in 1797, was to contribute +an occasional copy of verses for a stipulated annual sum; and some +dozen or so of his poems (notably among them the ode to <i>France</i> +and the two strange pieces <i>Fire Famine and Slaughter</i> and <i>The +Devil's Thoughts</i>) had entered the world in this way during the +years 1798 and 1799.</p> + +<p>Misled by the error above corrected, the writers of some of the brief +memoirs of Coleridge's life represent him as having sent verse +contributions to the <i>Morning Post</i> from Germany in 1799; but as +the earliest of these only appeared in August of that year there is no +reason to suppose that any of them were written before his return to +England. The longest of the serious pieces is the well-known <i>Ode to +Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire</i>, which cannot be regarded as one +of the happiest of Coleridge's productions. Its motive is certainly a +little slight, and its sentiment more than a little overstrained. The +noble enthusiasm of the noble lady who, "though nursed in pomp and +pleasure," could yet condescend to "hail the platform wild where once +the Austrian fell beneath the shaft of Tell," hardly strikes a reader +of the present day as remarkable enough to be worth "gushing" over; and +when the poet goes on to suggest as the explanation of Georgiana's +having "learned that heroic measure" that the Whig great lady had +suckled her own children, we certainly seem to have taken the fatal +step beyond the sublime! It is to be presumed that Tory great ladies +invariably employed the services of a wet-nurse, and hence failed to +win the same tribute from the angel of the earth, who, usually, while +he guides</p> + +<p> "His chariot-planet round the goal of day, + All trembling gazes on the eye of God,"</p> + +<p>but who on this occasion "a moment turned his awful face away" to gaze +approvingly on the high-born mother who had so conscientiously +performed her maternal duties.</p> + +<p>Very different is the tone of this poem from that of the two best known +of Coleridge's lighter contributions to the <i>Morning Post</i>. The +most successful of these, however, from the journalistic point of view, +is in a literary sense the less remarkable. One is indeed a little +astonished to find that a public, accustomed to such admirable political +satire as the <i>Anti-Jacobin</i>, should have been so much taken as it +seems to have been by the rough versification and somewhat clumsy sarcasm +of the <i>Devil's Thoughts</i>. The poem created something like a +<i>furore</i>, and sold a large reissue of the number of the <i>Morning +Post</i> in which it appeared. Nevertheless it is from the metrical point +of view doggerel, as indeed the author admits, three of its most smoothly-flowing stanzas being from the hand of Southey, while there is nothing in +its boisterous political drollery to put its composition beyond the reach +of any man of strong partisan feelings and a turn for street-humour. +<i>Fire Famine and Slaughter</i>, on the other hand, is literary in +every sense of the word, requiring indeed, and very urgently, to insist +on its character as literature, in order to justify itself against the +charge of inhuman malignity. Despite the fact that "letters four do +form his name," it is of course an idealised statesman, and not the +real flesh and blood Mr. Pitt, whom the sister furies, Fire, Famine, +and Slaughter, extol as their patron in these terrible lines. The poem +must be treated as what lawyers call an "A. B. case." Coleridge must be +supposed to be lashing certain alphabetical symbols arranged in a +certain order. This idealising process is perfectly easy and familiar +to everybody with the literary sense. The deduction for "poetic +license" is just as readily, though it does not, of course, require to +be as frequently, made with respect to the hyperbole of denunciation as +with respect to that of praise. Nor need we doubt that this deduction +had in fact been made by all intelligent readers long before that +agitating dinner at Mr. Sotheby's, which Coleridge describes with such +anxious gravity in his apologetic preface to the republication of the +lines. On the whole one may pretty safely accept De Quincey's view of +the true character of this incident as related by him in his own +inimitable fashion, namely, that it was in the nature of an elaborate +hoax, played off at the poet's expense. [<a href="#foot_4-3">3</a>] The malice of the piece is, +as De Quincey puts it, quite obviously a "malice of the understanding +and fancy," and not of the heart. There is significance in the mere +fact that the poem was deliberately published by Coleridge two years +after its composition, when the vehemence of his political animosities +had much abated. Written in 1796, it did not appear in the <i>Morning +Post</i> till January 1798.</p> + +<p>He was now, however, about to draw closer his connection with the +newspaper press. Soon after his return from Germany he was solicited +to "undertake the literary and political department in the <i>Morning +Post</i>," and acceded to the proposal "on condition that the paper +should thenceforward be conducted on certain fixed and announced +principles, and that he should be neither obliged nor requested to +deviate from them in favour of any party or any event." Accordingly, +from December 1799 until about midsummer of 1800, Coleridge became a +regular contributor of political articles to this journal, sometimes +to the number of two or three in one week. At the end of the period +of six months he quitted London, and his contributions became +necessarily less frequent, but they were continued (though with two +apparent breaks of many months in duration) [<a href="#foot_4-4">4</a>] until the close of +the year 1802. It would seem, however, that nothing but Coleridge's +own disinclination prevented this connection from taking a +form in which it would have profoundly modified his whole future +career. In a letter to Mr. Poole, dated March 1800, he informs his +friend that if he "had the least love of money" he could "make sure of +£2000 a year, for that Stuart had offered him half shares in his two +papers, the <i>Morning Post</i> and the <i>Courier</i>, if he would devote +himself to them in conjunction with their proprietor. But I told +him," he continues, "that I would not give up the country and the lazy +reading of old folios for two thousand times two thousand pounds, – in +short, that beyond £350 a year I considered money as a real evil." +Startlingly liberal as this offer will appear to the journalist, it +seems really to have been made. For, writing long afterwards to Mr. +Nelson Coleridge, Mr. Stuart says: "Could Coleridge and I place +ourselves thirty years back, and he be so far a man of business as to +write three or four hours a day, there is nothing I would not pay for +his assistance. I would take him into partnership, and I would enable +him to make a large fortune." Nor is there any reason to think that the +bargain would have been a bad one for the proprietor from the strictly +commercial point of view. Coleridge in later years may no doubt have +overrated the effect of his own contributions on the circulation of the +<i>Morning Post</i>, but it must have been beyond question considerable, +and would in all likelihood have become far greater if he could have +been induced to devote himself more closely to the work of journalism. +For the fact is – and it is a fact for which the current conception of +Coleridge's intellectual character does not altogether prepare one – that +he was a workman of the very first order of excellence in this curious +craft. The faculties which go to the attainment of such excellence are +not perhaps among the highest distinctions of the human mind, but, such +as they are, they are specific and well marked; they are by no means the +necessary accompaniments even of the most conspicuous literary power, +and they are likely rather to suffer than to profit by association with +great subtlety of intellect or wide philosophic grasp. It is not to the +advantage of the journalist, as such, that he should see too many +things at a time, or too far into any one thing, and even the gifts of +an active imagination and an abundant vocabulary are each of them +likely to prove a snare. To be wholly successful, the journalist – at +least the English journalist – must not be too eloquent, or too witty, +or too humorous, or too ingenious, or too profound. Yet the English +reader likes, or thinks he likes, eloquence; he has a keen sense of +humour, and a fair appreciation of wit; and he would be much hurt if he +were told that ingenuity and profundity were in themselves distasteful +to him. How, then, to give him enough of these qualities to please and +not enough to offend him – as much eloquence as will stir his emotions, +but not enough to arouse his distrust; as much wit as will carry home +the argument, but not enough to make him doubt its sincerity; as much +humour as will escape the charge of levity, as much ingenuity as can be +displayed without incurring suspicion, and as much profundity as may +impress without bewildering? This is a problem which is fortunately +simplified for most journalists by the fact of their possessing these +qualities in no more than, if in so much as, the minimum required. But +Coleridge, it must be remembered, possessed most of them in +embarrassing superfluity. Not all of them indeed, for, though he could +be witty and at times humorous, his temptations to excess in these +respects were doubtless not considerable. But as for his eloquence, he +was from his youth upwards <i>Isoo torrentior</i>, his dialectical +ingenuity was unequalled, and in disquisition of the speculative order +no man was so apt as he to penetrate more deeply into his subject than +most of his readers would care to follow him. <i>À priori</i>, +therefore, one would have expected that Coleridge's instincts would +have led him to rhetorise too much in his diction, to refine too much +in his arguments, and to philosophise too much in his reflections, to +have hit the popular taste as a journalist, and that at the age of +eight-and-twenty he would have been unable to subject these tendencies +either to the artistic repression of the maturer writer or to the +tactical restraints of the trained advocate. This eminently natural +assumption, however, is entirely rebutted by the facts. Nothing is more +remarkable in Coleridge's contributions to the <i>Morning Post</i> than +their thoroughly workmanlike character from the journalistic point of +view, their avoidance of "viewiness," their strict adherence to the one +or two simple points which he is endeavouring at any particular +juncture in politics to enforce upon his readers, and the steadiness +with which he keeps his own and his readers' attention fixed on the +special political necessities of the hour. His articles, in short, +belong to that valuable class to which, while it gives pleasure to the +cultivated reader, the most commonplace and Philistine man of business +cannot refuse the to him supreme praise of being eminently "practical." +They hit the nail on the head in nearly every case, and they take the +plainest and most direct route to their point, dealing in rhetoric and +metaphor only so far as the strictly "business" ends of the argument +appear to require. Nothing, for instance, could have been better done, +better reasoned and written, more skilfully adapted throughout to the +English taste, than Coleridge's criticism (3lst Dec. 1799) on the new +constitution established by Bonaparte and Sieyes on the foundation of +the Consulate, with its eighty senators, the "creatures of a renegade +priest, himself the creature of a foreign mercenary, its hundred +tribunes who are to talk and do nothing, and its three hundred +legislators whom the constitution orders to be silent." What a +ludicrous Purgatory, adds he, "for three hundred Frenchmen!" Very +vigorous, moreover, is he on the ministerial rejection of the French +proposals of peace in 1800, arguing against the continuance of the war +on the very sound anti-Jacobin ground that if it were unsuccessful it +would inflame French ambition anew, and, if successful, repeat the +experience of the results of rendering France desperate, and simply +reanimate Jacobinism.</p> + +<p>Effective enough too, for the controversial needs of the moment, +was the argument that if France were known, as Ministers pretended, +to be insincere in soliciting peace, "Ministers would certainly treat +with her, since they would again secure the support of the British +people in the war, and expose the ambition of the enemy;" and that, +therefore, the probability was that the British Government knew +France to be sincere, and shrank from negotiation lest it should +expose their own desire to prosecute the war. [<a href="#foot_4-5">5</a>] Most happy, again, +is his criticism of Lord Grenville's note, with its references +to the unprovoked aggression of France (in the matter of the opening of +the Scheldt, etc.) as the sole cause and origin of the war. "If this +were indeed true, in what ignorance must not Mr. Pitt and Mr. Windham +have kept the poor Duke of Portland, who declared in the House of Lords +that the cause of the war was the maintenance of the Christian +religion?"</p> + +<p>To add literary excellence of the higher order to the peculiar +qualities which give force to the newspaper article is for a +journalist, of course, a "counsel of perfection;" but it remains to be +remarked that Coleridge did make this addition in a most conspicuous +manner. Mrs. H. N. Coleridge's three volumes of her father's <i>Essays +on his own Times</i> deserve to live as literature apart altogether +from their merits as journalism. Indeed among the articles in the +<i>Morning Post</i> between 1799 and 1802 may be found some of the +finest specimens of Coleridge's maturer prose style. The character of +Pitt, which appeared on 19th March 1800, is as remarkable for its +literary merits as it is for the almost humorous political perversity +which would not allow the Minister any single merit except that which +he owed to the sedulous rhetorical training received by him from his +father, viz. "a premature and unnatural dexterity in the combination of +words." [<a href="#foot_4-6">6</a>] The letters to Fox, again, though a little artificialised +perhaps by reminiscences of Junius, are full of weight and dignity. But +by far the most piquant illustration of Coleridge's peculiar power is +to be found in the comparison between his own version of Pitt's speech +of 17th February 1800, on the continuance of the war, with the report +of it which appeared in the <i>Times</i> of that date. With the +exception of a few unwarranted elaborations of the arguments here and +there, the two speeches are in substance identical; but the effect of +the contrast between the minister's cold state-paper periods and the +life and glow of the poet-journalist's style is almost comic. Mr. +Gillman records that Canning, calling on business at the editor's, +inquired, as others had done, who was the reporter of the speech for +the <i>Morning Post</i>, and, on being told, remarked drily that the +report "did more credit to his head than to his memory."</p> + +<p>On the whole one can well understand Mr. Stuart's anxiety to secure +Coleridge's permanent collaboration with him in the business of +journalism; and it would be possible to maintain, with less of paradox +than may at first sight appear, that it would have been better not only +for Coleridge himself but for the world at large if the editor's efforts +had been successful. It would indeed have been bowing the neck to the +yoke; but there are some natures upon which constraint of that sort +exercises not a depressing but a steadying influence. What, after all, +would the loss in hours devoted to a comparatively inferior class of +literary labour have amounted to when compared with the gain in much-needed habits of method and regularity, and – more valuable than all to +an intellect like Coleridge's, – in the constant reminder that human +life is finite and the materials of human speculation infinite, and +that even a world-embracing mind must apportion its labour to its day? +There is, however, the great question of health to be considered – +<i>the</i> question, as every one knows, of Coleridge's whole career and +life. If health was destined to give way, in any event – if its +collapse, in fact, was simply the cause of all the lamentable external +results which followed it, while itself due only to predetermined +internal conditions over which the sufferer had no control – then to be +sure <i>cadit qu'stio</i>. At London or at the Lakes, among newspaper +files or old folios, Coleridge's life would in that case have run the +same sad course; and his rejection of Mr. Stuart's offer becomes a +matter of no particular interest to disappointed posterity. But be that +as it may, the "old folios" won the day. In the summer of 1800 Coleridge +quitted London, and having wound up his affairs at his then place of +residence, removed with his wife and children to a new and beautiful +home in that English Lake country with which his name was destined, +like those of Southey and Wordsworth, to be enduringly associated.</p> + +<blockquote style="font-variant: small-caps"><strong>Footnotes</strong></blockquote> + +<p><a name="foot_4-1"></a>1. De Quincey's error, in supposing that Coleridge's visit to Germany +to "complete his education" was made at an earlier date than this +journey with the Wordsworths, is a somewhat singular mistake for one so +well acquainted with the facts of Coleridge's life. Had we not his own +statement that this of 1798 was the first occasion of his quitting his +native country, it so happens that we can account in England for nearly +every month of his time from his leaving Cambridge until this date.</p> + +<p><a name="foot_4-2"></a>2. It has only within a comparatively recent period been ascertained +that the visit of the Wordsworths to Germany was itself another result +of Thomas Wedgwood's generous appreciation of literary merit. It +appears, on the incontrovertible testimony of the Wedgwoods' accounts +with their agents at Hamburg, that the expenses of all three travellers +were defrayed by their friend at home. The credits opened for them +amounted, during the course of their stay abroad, to some £260. – Miss +Meteyard's <i>A Group of Englishmen</i>, p. 99.</p> + +<p><a name="foot_4-3"></a>3. After quoting the +two concluding lines of the poem, "Fire's" rebuke of her inconstant +sisters, in the words</p> + +<p> "I alone am faithful, I + Cling to him everlastingly,"</p> + +<p>De Quincey proceeds: "The sentiment is diabolical; and the question +argued at the London dinner-table (Mr. Sotheby's) was 'Could the writer +have been other than a devil?'... Several of the great guns among the +literary body were present – in particular Sir Walter Scott, and he, we +believe, with his usual good nature, took the apologetic side of the +dispute; in fact, he was in the secret. Nobody else, barring the +author, knew at first whose good name was at stake. The scene must have +been high. The company kicked about the poor diabolic writer's head as +though it had been a tennis-ball. Coleridge, the yet unknown criminal, +absolutely perspired and fumed in pleading for the defendant; the +company demurred; the orator grew urgent; wits began to smoke the case +as an active verb, the advocate to smoke as a neuter verb; the 'fun +grew fast and furious,' until at length the delinquent arose, burning +tears in his eyes, and confessed to an audience now bursting with +stifled laughter (but whom he supposed to be bursting with fiery +indignation), 'Lo, I am he that wrote it.'"</p> + +<p><a name="foot_4-4"></a>4. <i>Sic</i> in <i>Essays on his own Times</i> by S. T. C., the +collection of her father's articles made by Mrs. Nelson (Sara) +Coleridge; but without attributing strange error to Coleridge's own +estimate (in the <i>Biographia Literaria</i>) of the amount of his +journalistic work, it is impossible to believe that this collection, +forming as it does but two small volumes, and a portion of a third, is +anything like complete.</p> + +<p><a name="foot_4-5"></a>5. Alas, that the facts should be so merciless to the most excellent +arguments! Coleridge could not foresee that Napoleon would, years +afterwards, admit in his own Memoirs the insincerity of his +overtures. "I had need of war; a treaty of peace...would have +withered every imagination." And when Mr. Pitt's answer arrived, +"it filled me with a secret satisfaction."</p> + +<p><a name="foot_4-6"></a>6. The following passage, too, is curious as showing how polemics, like +history, repeat themselves. "As his reasonings were, so is his +eloquence. One character pervades his whole being. Words on words, +finely arranged, and so dexterously consequent that the whole bears the +semblance of argument and still keeps awake a sense of surprise; but, +when all is done, nothing rememberable has been said; no one +philosophical remark, no one image, not even a pointed aphorism. Not a +sentence of Mr. Pitt's has ever been quoted, or formed the favourite +phrase of the day – a thing unexampled in any man of equal reputation." +With the alteration of one word – the proper name – this passage might +have been taken straight from some political diatribe of to-day.</p> + + + +<a name="chap5"></a> +<h2>Chapter V</h2> + +<blockquote>Life at Keswick – Second part of <i>Christabel</i> – Failing health – Resort +to opium – The <i>Ode to Dejection</i> – Increasing restlessness – Visit to Malta.</blockquote> + +<p style="text-align: center">[1800-1804.]</p> + +<p>We are now approaching the turning-point, moral and physical, of +Coleridge's career. The next few years determined not only his destiny +as a writer but his life as a man. Between his arrival at Keswick in +the summer of 1800 and his departure for Malta in the spring of 1804 +that fatal change of constitution, temperament, and habits which +governed the whole of his subsequent history had fully established +itself. Between these two dates he was transformed from the Coleridge +of whom his young fellow-students in Germany have left us so pleasing a +picture into the Coleridge whom distressed kinsmen, alienated friends, +and a disappointed public were to have before them for the remainder of +his days. Here, then, at Keswick, and in these first two or three years +of the century – here or nowhere is the key to the melancholy mystery to +be found.</p> + +<p>It is probable that only those who have gone with some +minuteness into the facts of this singular life are aware how great was +the change effected during this very short period of time. When +Coleridge left London for the Lake country he had not completed his +eight-and-twentieth year. Before he was thirty he wrote that <i>Ode to +Dejection</i> in which his spiritual and moral losses are so +pathetically bewailed. His health and spirits, his will and habits, may +not have taken any unalterable bent for the worse until 1804, the year +of his departure for Malta – the date which I have thought it safest to +assign as the definitive close of the earlier and happier period of his +life; but undoubtedly the change had fully manifested itself more than +two years before. And a very great and painful one it assuredly was. We +know from the recorded evidence of Dr. Carrlyon and others that +Coleridge was full of hope and gaiety, full of confidence in himself +and of interest in life during his few months' residence in Germany. +The <i>annus mirabilis</i> of his poetic life was but two years behind +him, and his achievements of 1797-98 seemed to him but a mere earnest +of what he was destined to accomplish. His powers of mental +concentration were undiminished, as his student days at Göttingen +sufficiently proved; his conjugal and family affections, as Dr. +Carrlyon notes for us, were still unimpaired; his own verse gives signs +of a home-sickness and a yearning for his own fireside which were in +melancholy contrast with the restlessness of his later years. Nay, even +after his return to England, and during the six months of his regular +work on the <i>Morning Post</i>, the vigour of his political articles +entirely negatives the idea that any relaxation of intellectual energy +had as yet set in. Yet within six months of his leaving London for +Keswick there begins a progressive decline in Coleridge's literary +activity in every form. The second part of <i>Christabel</i>, beautiful +but inferior to the first, was composed in the autumn of 1800, and for +the next two years, so far as the higher forms of literature are +concerned, "the rest is silence." The author of the prefatory memoir in +the edition of Coleridge's <i>Poetical and Dramatic Works</i> (1880), +enumerates some half-dozen slight pieces contributed to the <i>Morning +Post</i> in 1801, but declares that Coleridge's poetical contributions +to this paper during 1802 were "very rich and varied, and included the +magnificent ode entitled <i>Dejection</i>." Only the latter clause of +this statement is entitled, I think, to command our assent. Varied +though the list may be, it is hardly to be described as "rich." It +covers only about seven weeks in the autumn of 1802, and, with the +exception of the <i>Lovers' Resolution</i> and the "magnificent ode" +referred to, the pieces are of the shortest and slightest kind. Nor is +it accurate to say that the "political articles of the same period were +also numerous and important." On the contrary, it would appear from an +examination of Mrs. H. N. Coleridge's collection that her father's +contributions to the <i>Post</i> between his departure from London and +the autumn of 1802 were few and intermittent, and in August 1803 the +proprietorship of that journal passed out of Mr. Stuart's hands. It is, +in short, I think, impossible to doubt that very shortly after his +migration to the Lake country he practically ceased not only to write +poetry but to produce any mentionable quantity of <i>complete</i> work +in the prose form. His mind, no doubt, was incessantly active +throughout the whole of the deplorable period upon which we are now +entering; but it seems pretty certain that its activity was not poetic +nor even critical, but purely philosophical, and that the products of +that activity went exclusively to <i>marginalia</i> and the pages of +note-books.</p> + +<p>Yet unfortunately we have almost no evidence, personal or +other, from which we can with any certainty construct the +psychological – if one should not rather say the physiological, or +better still, perhaps, the pathological – history of this cardinal epoch +in Coleridge's life. Miss Wordsworth's diary is nearly silent about him +for the next few years; he was living indeed some dozen miles from her +brother at Grasmere, and they could not therefore have been in daily +intercourse. Southey did not come to the Lakes till 1803, and the +records of his correspondence only begin therefore from that date. Mr. +Cottle's <i>Reminiscences</i> are here a blank; Charles Lamb's +correspondence yields little; and though De Quincey has plenty to say +about this period in his characteristic fashion, it must have been +based upon pure gossip, as he cites no authorities, and did not himself +make Coleridge's acquaintance till six years afterwards. This, however, +is at least certain, that his gloomy accounts of his own health begin +from a period at which his satisfaction with his new abode was still as +fresh as ever. The house which he had taken, now historic as the +residence of two famous Englishmen, enjoyed a truly beautiful situation +and the command of a most noble view. It stood in the vale of +Derwentwater, on the bank of the river Greta, and about a mile from the +lake. When Coleridge first entered it, it was uncompleted, and an +arrangement was made by which, after completion, it was to be divided +between the tenant and the landlord, a Mr. Jackson. As it turned out, +however, the then completed portion was shared by them in common, the +other portion, and eventually the whole, being afterwards occupied by +Southey. In April 1801, some eight or nine months after his taking +possession of Greta Hall, Coleridge thus describes it to its future +occupant: – </p> + +<p>"Our house stands on a low hill, the whole front of which +is one field and an enormous garden, nine-tenths of which is a nursery +garden. Behind the house is an orchard and a small wood on a steep +slope, at the foot of which is the river Greta, which winds round and +catches the evening's light in the front of the house. In front we have +a giant camp – an encamped army of tent-like mountains which, by an +inverted arch, gives a view of another vale. On our right the lovely +vale and the wedge-shaped lake of Bassenthwaite; and on our left +Derwentwater and Lodore full in view, and the fantastic mountains of +Borrowdale. Behind is the massy Skiddaw, smooth, green, high, with two +chasms and a tent-like ridge in the larger. A fairer scene you have not +seen in all your wanderings."</p> + +<p>There is here no note of discontent with +the writer's surroundings; and yet, adds Mr. Cuthbert Southey in his +<i>Life and Correspondence</i> of his father, the remainder of this +letter was filled by Coleridge with "a most gloomy account of his +health." Southey writes him in reply that he is convinced that his +friend's "complaint is gouty, that good living is necessary and a good +climate." In July of the same year he received a visit from Southey at +Greta Hall, and one from Charles and Mary Lamb in the following summer, +and it is probable that during such intervals of pleasurable excitement +his health and spirits might temporarily rally. But henceforward and +until his departure for Malta we gather nothing from any source as to +Coleridge's <i>normal</i> condition of body and mind which is not +unfavourable, and it is quite certain that he had long before 1804 +enslaved himself to that fatal drug which was to remain his tyrant for +the rest of his days.</p> + +<p>When, then, and how did this slavery begin? What +was the precise date of Coleridge's first experiences of opium, and +what the original cause of his taking it? Within what time did its use +become habitual? To what extent was the decline of his health the +effect of the evil habit, and to what, if any, extent its cause? And +how far, if at all, can the deterioration of his character and powers +be attributed to a decay of physical constitution, brought about by +influences beyond the sufferer's own control?</p> + +<p>Could every one of these questions be completely answered, we should be +in a position to solve the very obscure and painful problem before us; +but though some of them can be answered with more or less approach to +completeness, there is only one of them which can be finally disposed +of. It is certain, and it is no doubt matter for melancholy +satisfaction to have ascertained it, that Coleridge first had +recourse to opium as an anodyne. It was Nature's revolt from pain, and +not her appetite for pleasure, which drove him to the drug; and though +De Quincey, with his almost comical malice, remarks that, though +Coleridge began in the desire to obtain relief "there is no proof that +he did not end in voluptuousness," there is on the other hand no proof +whatever that he did so end – <i>until the habit was formed</i>. It is +quite consistent with probability, and only accords with Coleridge's +own express affirmations, to believe that it was the medicinal efficacy +of opium, and this quality of it alone, which induced him to resort to +it again and again until his senses contracted that well-known and +insatiable craving for the peculiar excitement, "voluptuous" only to +the initiated, which opium-intoxication creates. But let Coleridge +speak on this point for himself. Writing in April 1826 he says: – </p> + +<p>"I wrote a few stanzas three-and-twenty years ago, soon after my eyes +had been opened to the true nature of the habit into which I had been +ignorantly deluded by the seeming magic effects of opium, in the +sudden removal of a supposed rheumatic affection, attended with +swellings in my knees and palpitation of the heart and pains all over +me, by which I had been bed-ridden for nearly six months. Unhappily +among my neighbours' and landlord's books were a large number of +medical reviews and magazines. I had always a fondness (a common case, +but most mischievous turn with reading men who are at all dyspeptic) +for dabbling in medical writings; and in one of these reviews I met a +case which I fancied very like my own, in which a cure had been +effected by the Kendal Black Drop. In an evil hour I procured it: it +worked miracles – the swellings disappeared, the pains vanished. I was +all alive, and all around me being as ignorant as myself, nothing +could exceed my triumph. I talked of nothing else, prescribed the +newly-discovered panacea for all complaints, and carried a little +about with me not to lose any opportunity of administering 'instant +relief and speedy cure' to all complainers, stranger or friend, gentle +or simple. Alas! it is with a bitter smile, a laugh of gall and +bitterness, that I recall this period of unsuspecting delusion, and +how I first became aware of the Maelstrom, the fatal whirlpool to +which I was drawing, just when the current was beyond my strength to +stem. The state of my mind is truly portrayed in the following +effusion, for God knows! that from that time I was the victim of pain +and terror, nor had I at any time taken the flattering poison as a +stimulus or for any craving after pleasurable sensation."</p> + +<p>The "effusion" in question has parted company with the autobiographical +note, and the author of the prefatory memoir above quoted conjectures +it to have been a little poem entitled the <i>Visionary Hope</i>; but I am +myself of opinion, after a careful study of both pieces, that it is +more probably the <i>Pains of Sleep</i>, which moreover is known to +have been written in 1803. But whichever it be, its date is fixed in +that year by the statement in the autobiographical note of 1826 that +the stanzas referred to in it were written "twenty-three years ago." +Thus, then, we have the two facts established, that the opium-taking +habit had its origin in a bodily ailment, and that at some time in +1803 that habit had become confirmed. The disastrous experiment in +amateur therapeutics, which was the means of implanting it, could not +have taken place, according to the autobiographical note, until at +least six months after Coleridge's arrival at Keswick, and perhaps not +for some months later yet. At any rate, it seems tolerably certain +that it was not till the spring of 1801, when the climate of the +Lake country first began to tell unfavourably on his health, that +the "Kendal Black Drop" was taken. Possibly it may have been about +the time (April 1801) when he wrote the letter to Southey which has +been quoted above, and which, it will be remembered, contained "so +gloomy an account of his health." How painfully ailing he was at this +time we know from a variety of sources, from some of which we also +gather that he must have been a sufferer in more or less serious +forms from his boyhood upwards. Mr. Gillman, for instance, who speaks +on this point with the twofold authority of confidant and medical +expert, records a statement of Coleridge's to the effect that, as a +result of such schoolboy imprudences as "swimming over the New River +in my clothes and remaining in them, full half the time from seventeen +to eighteen was passed by me in the sick ward of Christ's Hospital, +afflicted with jaundice and rheumatic fever." From these +indiscretions and their consequences "may be dated," Mr. Gillman +thinks, "all his bodily sufferings in future life." That he was a +martyr to periodical attacks of rheumatism for some years before his +migration to Keswick is a conclusion resting upon something more than +conjecture. The <i>Ode to the Departing Year</i> (1796) was written, as +he has himself told us, under a severe attack of rheumatism in the +head. In 1797 he describes himself in ill health, and as forced to +retire on that account to the "lonely farmhouse between Porlock and +London on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire," where +<i>Kubla Khan</i> was written. [<a href="#foot_5-1">1</a>]</p> + +<p>Thus much is, moreover, certain, +that whatever were Coleridge's health and habits during the first two +years of his residence at Keswick, his career as a poet – that is to +say, as a poet of the first order – was closed some months before that +period had expired. The ode entitled <i>Dejection</i>, to which +reference has so often been made, was written on the 4th of April 1802, +and the evidential importance which attaches, in connection with the +point under inquiry, to this singularly pathetic utterance has been +almost universally recognised. Coleridge has himself cited its most +significant passage in the <i>Biographia Literaria</i> as supplying the +best description of his mental state at the time when it was written. +De Quincey quotes it with appropriate comments in his <i>Coleridge and +Opium-Eating</i>. Its testimony is reverently invoked by the poet's son +in the introductory essay prefixed by him to his edition of his +father's works. The earlier stanzas are, however, so necessary to the +comprehension of Coleridge's mood at this time that a somewhat long +extract must be made. In the opening stanza he expresses a longing that +the storm which certain atmospheric signs of a delusively calm evening +appear to promise might break forth, so that</p> + +<p> "Those sounds which oft have raised me, whilst they awed, + And sent my soul abroad, + Might now perhaps their wonted impulse give, + Might startle this dull pain, and make it move and live."</p> + +<p>And thus, with ever-deepening sadness, the poem proceeds:</p> + +<p> "A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear, + A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief, + Which finds no natural outlet, no relief, + In word, or sigh, or tear – + O Lady! in this wan and heartless mood, + To other thoughts by yonder throstle woo'd, + All this long eve, so balmy and serene, + Have I been gazing on the western sky, + And its peculiar tint of yellow green: + And still I gaze – and with how blank an eye! + And those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars, + That give away their motion to the stars; + Those stars, that glide behind them or between, + Now sparkling, now bedimmed, but always seen: + Yon crescent Moon as fixed as if it grew + In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue; + I see them all so excellently fair, + I see, not feel how beautiful they are!</p> + +<p> "My genial spirits fail, + And what can these avail + To lift the smothering weight from off my breast? + It were a vain endeavour, + Though I should gaze for ever + On that green light that lingers in the west: + I may not hope from outward forms to win + The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.</p> + +<p> "O Lady! we receive but what we give, + And in our life alone does nature live: + Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud! + And would we aught behold, of higher worth, + Than that inanimate cold world allowed + To the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd, + Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth, + A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud + Enveloping the earth – + And from the soul itself must there be sent + A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth, + Of all sweet sounds the life and element!</p> + +<p> "O pure of heart! thou need'st not ask of me + What this strong music in the soul may be! + What, and wherein it doth exist, + This light, this glory, this fair luminous mist, + This beautiful and beauty-making power. + Joy, virtuous Lady! Joy that ne'er was given, + Save to the pure, and in their purest hour, + Life, and Life's effluence, cloud at once and shower, + Joy, Lady! is the spirit and the power, + Which, wedding Nature to us, gives in dower + A new Earth and new Heaven, + Undreamt of by the sensual and the proud – + Joy is the sweet voice, Joy the luminous cloud – + We in ourselves rejoice! + And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight, + All melodies the echoes of that voice, + All colours a suffusion from that light."</p> + +<p>And then follows the much quoted, profoundly touching, deeply significant +stanza to which we have referred: – </p> + +<p> "There was a time when, though my path was rough, + This joy within me dallied with distress, + And all misfortunes were but as the stuff + Whence Fancy made me dreams of happiness: + For hope grew round me, like the twining vine, + And fruits, and foliage, not my own, seemed mine. + But now afflictions how me down to earth: + Nor care I that they rob me of my mirth, + But O! each visitation + Suspends what nature gave me at my birth, + My shaping spirit of Imagination. + For not to think of what I needs must feel, + But to be still and patient, all I can; + And haply by abstruse research to steal + From my own nature all the natural Man – + This was my sole resource, my only plan: + Till that which suits a part infects the whole, + And now is almost grown the habit of my Soul."</p> + +<p>Sadder lines than these were never perhaps written by any poet in +description of his own feelings. And what gives them their peculiar +sadness – as also, of course, their special biographical value – is that +they are not, like Shelley's similarly entitled stanzas, the mere +expression of a passing mood. They are the record of a life change, a +veritable threnody over a spiritual death. For there can be no doubt – +his whole subsequent history goes to show it – that Coleridge's "shaping +spirit of Imagination" was in fact dead when these lines were written. +To a man of stronger moral fibre a renascence of the poetical instinct +in other forms might, as I have suggested above, been possible; but the +poet of <i>Christabel</i> and the <i>Ancient Mariner</i> was dead. The +metaphysician had taken his place, and was striving, in abstruse +research, to live in forgetfulness of the loss. Little more, that is to +say, than a twelvemonth after the composition of the second part of +<i>Christabel</i> the impulse which gave birth to it had passed away +for ever. Opium-taking had doubtless begun by this time – may +conceivably indeed have begun nearly a year before – and the mere +<i>mood</i> of the poem, the temporary phase of feeling which directed +his mind inwards into deeper reflections on its permanent state, is no +doubt strongly suggestive, in its excessive depression, of the terrible +reaction which is known to follow upon opium-excitement. But, I +confess, it seems to me improbable that even the habitual use of the +stimulant for so comparatively short a time as twelve months could have +produced so profound a change in Coleridge's intellectual nature. I +cannot but think that De Quincey overstates the case in declaring that +"opium killed Coleridge as a poet," though it may well be that, after +the collapse of health, which appears to me to have been the real +<i>causa causans</i> in the matter, had killed the poet as we know him, +opium prevented his resurrection in another and it may be but little +inferior form. On the whole, in fact, the most probable account of this +all-important era in Coleridge's life appears to me to be this: that in +the course of 1801, as he was approaching his thirtieth year, a +distinct change for the worse – precipitated possibly, as Mr. Gillman +thinks, by the climate of his new place of abode – took place in his +constitution; that his rheumatic habit of body, and the dyspeptic +trouble by which it was accompanied became confirmed; and that the +severe attacks of the acute form of the malady which he underwent +produced such a permanent lowering of his vitality and animal spirits +as, <i>first</i>, to extinguish the creative impulse, and <i>then</i> +to drive him to the physical anodyne of opium and to the mental +stimulant of metaphysics.</p> + +<p>From the summer of 1801, at any rate, his <i>malaise</i>, both of mind +and body, appears to have grown apace. Repeated letters from Southey +allow us to see how deeply concerned he was at this time about his +friend's condition. Plans of foreign travel are discussed between +them, and Southey endeavours in vain to spur his suffering and +depressed correspondent to "the assertion of his supremacy" in some +new literary work. But, with the exception of his occasional +contributions to the press, whatever he committed to paper +during these years exists only, if at all, in a fragmentary form. And +his restlessness, continually on the increase, appears by the end of +1802 to have become ungovernable. In November of that year he eagerly +accepted an offer from Thomas Wedgwood to become his companion on a +tour, and he spent this and the greater part of the following month in +South Wales with some temporary advantage, it would seem, to his health +and spirits. "Coleridge," writes Mr. Wedgwood to a friend, "is all +kindness to me, and in prodigious favour here. He is quite easy, +cheerful, and takes great pains to make himself pleasant. He is +willing, indeed desirous, to accompany me to any part of the globe." +"Coll and I," he writes on another occasion, the abbreviation of name +having been suggested to him by Coleridge himself, "harmonise +amazingly," and adds that his companion "takes long rambles, and writes +a great deal." But the fact that such changes of air and scene produced +no permanent effect upon the invalid after his return to his own home +appears to show that now, at any rate, his fatal habit had obtained a +firm hold upon him. And his "writing a great deal resulted" only in the +filling of many note-books, and perhaps the sketching out of many of +those vast schemes of literary labour of which he was destined to leave +so remarkable a collection at his death. One such we find him +forwarding to Southey in the August of 1803 – the plan of a Bibliotheca +Britannica, or "History of British Literature, bibliographical, +biographical, and critical," in eight volumes. The first volume was to +contain a "complete history of all Welsh, Saxon, and Erse books that +are not translations, but the native growth of Britain;" to accomplish +which, writes Coleridge, "I will with great pleasure join you in +learning Welsh and Erse." The second volume was to contain the history +of English poetry and poets, including "all prose truly poetical." The +third volume "English prose, considered as to style, as to eloquence, +as to general impressiveness; a history of styles and manners, their +causes, their birthplace and parentage, their analysis." The fourth +volume would take up "the history of metaphysics, theology, medicine, +alchemy; common, canon, and Roman law from Alfred to Henry VII." The +fifth would "carry on metaphysics and ethics to the present day in the +first half, and comprise in the second half the theology of all the +reformers." In the sixth and seventh volumes were to be included "all +the articles you (Southey) can get on all the separate arts and +sciences that have been treated of in books since the Reformation; and +by this time," concludes the enthusiastic projector, "the book, if it +answered at all, would have gained so high a reputation that you need +not fear having whom you liked to write the different articles – +medicine, surgery, chemistry, etc.; navigation, travellers' voyages, +etc., etc." There is certainly a melancholy humour in the formulation +of so portentous a scheme by a man who was at this moment wandering +aimlessly among the lakes and mountains, unable to settle down to any +definite piece of literary work, or even to throw off a fatal habit, +which could not fail, if persevered in, to destroy all power of steady +application in the future. That neither the comic nor the pathetic +element in the situation was lost upon Southey is evident from his +half-sad, half-satirical, wholly winning reply. "Your plan," he writes, +"is too good, too gigantic, quite beyond my powers. If you had my +tolerable state of health and that love of steady and productive +employment which is now grown into a necessary habit with me, if you +were to execute and would execute it, it would be beyond all doubt the +most valuable work of any age or any country; but I cannot fill up such +an outline. No man can better feel where he fails than I do, and to +rely upon you for whole quartos! Dear Coleridge, the smile that comes +with that thought is a very melancholy one; and if Edith saw me now she +would think my eyes were weak again, when in truth the humour that +covers them springs from another cause." A few weeks after this +interchange of correspondence Coleridge was once again to prove how far +he was from possessing Southey's "tolerable state of health." +Throughout the whole of this year he had been more restless than ever. +In January 1803 we find him staying with Southey at Bristol, "suffering +terribly from the climate, and talking of going abroad." A week later +he is at Stowey, planning schemes, not destined to be realised, of +foreign travel with Wedgwood. Returning again to Keswick, he started, +after a few months' quiescence, on 15th August, in company with +Wordsworth and his sister, for a tour in Scotland, but after a +fortnight he found himself too ill to proceed. The autumn rains set in, +and "poor Coleridge," writes Miss Wordsworth, "being very unwell, +determined to send his clothes to Edinburgh, and make the best of his +way thither, being afraid to face much wet weather in an open +carriage." It is possible, however, that his return to Keswick may have +been hastened by the circumstance that Southey, who had paid a brief +visit to the Lake country two years before, was expected in a few days +at the house which was destined to be his abode for the longest portion +of his life. He arrived at Greta Hall on 7th September 1803, and from +time to time during the next six months his correspondence gives us +occasional glimpses of Coleridge's melancholy state. At the end of +December, his health growing steadily worse, he conceived the project +of a voyage to Madeira, and quitted Keswick with the intention, after +paying a short visit to the Wordsworths, of betaking himself to London +to make preparations. His stay at Grasmere, however, was longer than he +had counted on. "He was detained for a month by a severe attack of +illness, induced, if his description is to be relied on, by the use of +narcotics. [<a href="#foot_5-2">2</a>] Unsuspicious of the cause, Mrs. and Miss Wordsworth +nursed him with the tenderest affection, while the poet himself, +usually a parsimonious man, forced upon him, to use Coleridge's own +words, a hundred pounds in the event of his going to Madeira, and his +friend Stuart offered to befriend him." From Grasmere he went to +Liverpool, where he spent a pleasant week with his old Unitarian +friend, Dr. Crompton, and arrived in London at the close of 1803. Here, +however, his plans were changed. Malta was substituted for Madeira, in +response to an invitation from his friend Mr., afterwards Sir John, +Stoddart, then resident as judge in the Mediterranean island. By 12th +March, as we gather from the Southey correspondence, the change of +arrangements had been made. Two days afterwards he receives a letter of +valediction from his "old friend and brother" at Greta Hall, and on 2d +April 1804, he sailed from England in the <i>Speedwell</i>, dropping +anchor sixteen days later in Valetta harbour.</p> + +<blockquote style="font-variant: small-caps"><strong>Footnotes</strong></blockquote> + +<p><a name="foot_5-1"></a>1. Were it not for Coleridge's express statement that he first took +opium at Keswick, one would be inclined to attribute the gorgeous but +formless imagery of that poem to the effects of the stimulant. It is +certainly very like a metrical version of one of the pleasant variety +of opium-dreams described in De Quincey's poetic prose.</p> + +<p><a name="foot_5-2"></a>2. See Miss Meteyard (<i>A Group of Englishmen</i>, p. 223). Her +evidence, however, on any point otherwise doubtful in Coleridge's +history should be received with caution, as her estimate of the poet +certainly errs somewhat on the side of excessive harshness.</p> + + + +<a name="chap6"></a> +<h2>Chapter VI</h2> + +<blockquote>Stay at Malta – Its injurious effects – Return to England – Meeting +with De Quincey – Residence in London – First series of lectures.</blockquote> + +<p style='text-align: center'>[1806-1809.]</p> + +<p>Never was human being destined so sadly and signally to illustrate the +<i>coelum non animum</i> aphorism as the unhappy passenger on the +<i>Speedwell</i>. Southey shall describe his condition when he left +England; and his own pathetic lines to William Wordsworth will picture +him to us on his return. "You are in great measure right about +Coleridge," writes the former to his friend Rickman, "he is worse in +body than you seem to believe; but the main cause lies in his own +management of himself, or rather want of management. His mind is in a +perpetual St. Vitus's dance – eternal activity without action. At times +he feels mortified that he should have done so little, but this feeling +never produces any exertion. 'I will begin to-morrow,' he says, and +thus he has been all his lifelong letting to-day slip. He has had no +heavy calamities in life, and so contrives to be miserable about +trifles. Poor fellow, there is no one thing which gives me so much pain +as the witnessing such a waste of unequalled powers." Then, after +recalling the case of a highly promising schoolfellow, who had made +shipwreck of his life, and whom "a few individuals only remember with a +sort of horror and affection, which just serves to make them melancholy +whenever they think of him or mention his name," he adds: "This will +not be the case with Coleridge; the <i>disjecta membra</i> will be +found if he does not die early: but having so much to do, so many +errors to weed out of the world which he is capable of eradicating, if +he does die without doing his work, it would half break my heart, for +no human being has had more talents allotted." Such being his closest +friend's account of him, and knowing, as we now do (what Southey +perhaps had no suspicion of at the time), the chief if not the sole or +original cause of his morally nerveless condition, it is impossible not +to feel that he did the worst possible thing for himself in taking this +journey to Malta. In quitting England he cut himself off from those +last possibilities of self-conquest which the society and counsels of +his friends might otherwise have afforded him, and the consequences +were, it is to be feared, disastrous. After De Quincey's incredibly +cool assertion that it was "notorious that Coleridge began the use of +opium, not as a relief from any bodily pain or nervous irritations, +since his constitution was strong and excellent(!), but as a source of +luxurious sensations," we must receive anything which he has to say on +this particular point with the utmost caution; but there is only too +much plausibility in his statement that, Coleridge being necessarily +thrown, while at Malta, "a good deal upon his own resources in the +narrow society of a garrison, he there confirmed and cherished ... his +habit of taking opium in large quantities." Contrary to his +expectations, moreover, the Maltese climate failed to benefit him. At +first, indeed, he did experience some feeling of relief, but +afterwards, according to Mr. Gillman, he spoke of his rheumatic limbs +as "lifeless tools," and of the "violent pains in his bowels, which +neither opium, ether, nor peppermint combined could relieve."</p> + +<p>Occupation, however, was not wanting to him, if occupation +could have availed in the then advanced stage of his case. He early +made the acquaintance of the governor of the island, Sir Alexander +Ball, who, having just lost his secretary by death, requested Cole-ridge to undertake that official's duties until his successor should be +appointed. By this arrangement the governor and the public service in +all likelihood profited more than the provisional secretary; for +Coleridge's literary abilities proved very serviceable in the +department of diplomatic correspondence. The dignities of the office, +Mr. Gillman tells us, no doubt on Coleridge's own authority, "he never +attempted to support; he was greatly annoyed at what he thought its +unnecessary parade, and he petitioned Sir Alexander Ball to be relieved +from it." The purely mechanical duties of the post, too, appear to have +troubled him. He complains, in one of the journals which he kept during +this period, of having been "for months past incessantly employed in +official tasks, subscribing, examining, administering oaths, auditing, +etc." On the whole it would seem that the burden of his secretarial +employment, though doubtless it would have been found light enough by +any one accustomed to public business, was rather a weariness to the +flesh than a distraction to the mind; while in the meantime a new +symptom of disorder – a difficulty of breathing, to which he was always +afterwards subject – began to manifest itself in his case. Probably he +was glad enough – relieved, in more than one sense of the word – when, in +the autumn of 1805, the new secretary arrived at Malta to take his +place.</p> + +<p>On 27th September Coleridge quitted the island on his homeward +journey <i>vi´</i> Italy, stopping for a short time at Syracuse on his +way. At Naples, which he reached on the 15th of December, he made a +longer stay, and in Rome his sojourn lasted some months. Unfortunately, +for a reason which will presently appear, there remains no written +record of his impressions of the Eternal City; and though Mr. Gillman +assures us that the gap is "partly filled by his own verbal account, +repeated at various times to the writer of this memoir," the public of +to-day is only indebted to "the writer of this memoir" for the not very +startling information that Coleridge, "while in Rome, was actively +employed in visiting the great works of art, statues, pictures, +buildings, palaces, etc. etc., observations on which he minuted down +for publication." It is somewhat more interesting to learn that he made +the acquaintance of many literary and artistic notabilities at that +time congregated there, including Tieck, the German poet and novelist, +and the American painter Alston, to whose skill we owe what is reputed +to be the best of his many not easily reconcilable portraits. The loss +of his Roman memoranda was indirectly brought about by a singular +incident, his account of which has met with some undeserved ridicule at +the hands of Tory criticism. When about to quit Rome for England +<i>vié</i> Switzerland and Germany he took the precaution of inquiring +of Baron von Humboldt, brother of the traveller, and then Prussian +Minister at the Court of Rome, whether the proposed route was safe, and +was by him informed that he would do well to keep out of the reach of +Bonaparte, who was meditating the seizure of his person. According to +Coleridge, indeed, an order for his arrest had actually been +transmitted to Rome, and he was only saved from its execution by the +connivance of the "good old Pope," Pius VII., who sent him a passport +and counselled his immediate flight. Hastening to Leghorn, he +discovered an American vessel ready to sail for England, on board of +which he embarked. On the voyage she was chased by a French vessel, +which so alarmed the captain that he compelled Coleridge to throw his +papers, including these precious MSS., overboard. The wrath of the +First Consul against him was supposed to have been excited by his +contributions to the <i>Morning Post</i>, an hypothesis which De +Quincey reasonably finds by no means so ridiculous as it appeared to a +certain writer in <i>Blackwood</i>, who treated it as the "very +consummation of moonstruck vanity," and compared it to "John Dennis's +frenzy in retreating from the sea-coast under the belief that Louis +XIV. had commissioned commissaries to land on the English shore and +make a dash at his person." It must be remembered, however, that Mr. +Fox, to whose statement on such a point Napoleon would be likely to +attach especial weight, had declared in the House of Commons that the +rupture of the Peace of Amiens had been brought about by certain essays +in the <i>Morning Post</i>, and there is certainly no reason to believe +that a tyrant whose animosity against literary or quasi-literary +assailants ranged from Madame de Staël down to the bookseller Palm +would have regarded a man of Coleridge's reputation in letters as +beneath the stoop of his vengeance.</p> + +<p>After an absence of two years and a half Coleridge arrived in England +in August 1806. That his then condition of mind and body was a +profoundly miserable one, and that he himself was acutely conscious +of it, will be seen later on in certain extracts from his correspondence; +but his own <i>Lines to William Wordsworth</i> – lines "composed on the +night after his recitation of a poem on the growth of an individual +mind" – contain an even more tragic expression of his state. It was +Wordsworth's pensive retrospect of their earlier years together which +awoke the bitterest pangs of self-reproach in his soul, and wrung from +it the cry which follows: – </p> + +<p> "Ah! as I listened with a heart forlorn + The pulses of my being beat anew: + And even as life returns upon the drowned, + Life's joy rekindling roused a throng of pains – + Keen pangs of Love, awakening as a babe + Turbulent, with an outcry in the heart; + And fears self-willed, that shunned the eye of hope; + And hope that scarce would know itself from fear; + Sense of past youth, and manhood come in vain, + And genius given, and knowledge won in vain; + And all which I had culled in wood-walks wild, + And all which patient toil had reared, and all, + Commune with thee had opened out – but flowers + Strewn on my corse, and borne upon my bier, + In the same coffin, for the self-same grave!"</p> + +<p>A dismal and despairing strain indeed, but the situation unhappily was +not less desperate. We are, in fact, entering upon that period of +Coleridge's life – a period, roughly speaking, of about ten years – which +no admirer of his genius, no lover of English letters, no one, it might +even be said, who wishes to think well of human nature, can ever +contemplate without pain. His history from the day of his landing in +England in August 1806 till the day when he entered Mr. Gillman's house +in 1816 is one long and miserable story of self-indulgence and self-reproach, of lost opportunities, of neglected duties, of unfinished +undertakings. His movements and his occupation for the first year after +his return are not now traceable with exactitude, but his time was +apparently spent partly in London and partly at Grasmere and Keswick. +When in London, Mr. Stuart, who had now become proprietor of the +<i>Courier</i>, allowed him to occupy rooms at the office of that +newspaper to save him expense; and Coleridge, though his regular +connection with the <i>Courier</i> did not begin till some years +afterwards, may possibly have repaid the accommodation by occasional +contributions or by assistance to its editor in some other form. It +seems certain, at any rate, that if he was earning no income in this +way he was earning none at all. His friend and patron, Mr. Thomas +Wedgwood, had died while he was in Malta; but the full pension of £150 +per annum bestowed upon him by the two brothers jointly continued to be +paid to him by Josiah, the senior. Coleridge, however, had landed in +England in ignorance of his patron's death. He had wholly neglected to +keep up any correspondence with the Wedgwoods during his stay in Malta, +and though "dreadfully affected" by it, as Mr. Poole records, he seems +to have allowed nearly a year to elapse before communicating with the +surviving brother. The letter which he then wrote deserves quotation, +not only as testimony to his physical and pecuniary condition on his +arrival in England, but as affording a distressing picture of the +morbid state of his emotions and the enfeebled condition of his will. +"As to the reasons for my silence, they are," he incoherently begins, +"impossible, and the numbers of the <i>causes</i> of it, with the +almost weekly expectation for the last eight months of receiving my +books, manuscripts, etc. from Malta, has been itself a cause of +increasing the procrastination which constant ill health, despondency, +domestic distractions, and embarrassment from accidents, equally +unconnected with my will or conduct" [every cause mentioned, it will be +seen, but the true one], "had already seated deep in my very muscles, +as it were. I do not mean to accuse myself of idleness – I have enough +of self-crimination without adding imaginary articles – but in all +things that affect my moral feelings I have sunk under such a strange +cowardice of pain that I have not unfrequently kept letters from +persons dear to me for weeks together unopened. After a most miserable +passage from Leghorn of fifty-five days, during which my life was twice +given over, I found myself again in my native country, ill, penniless, +and worse than homeless. I had been near a month in the country before +I ventured or could summon courage enough to ask a question concerning +you and yours, and yet God Almighty knows that every hour the thought +had been gnawing at my heart. I then for the first time heard of that +event which sounded like my own knell, without its natural hope or +sense of rest. Such shall I be (is the thought that haunts me), but O! +not such; O! with what a different retrospect! But I owe it to justice +to say, Such good I truly can do myself, etc., etc." The rest of this +painfully inarticulate letter is filled with further complaints of ill +health, with further protestations of irresponsibility for the neglect +of duties, and with promises, never to be fulfilled, of composing or +assisting others to compose a memoir of Thomas Wedgwood, who, in +addition to his general repute as a man of culture, had made a special +mark by his speculations in psychology.</p> + +<p>The singular expression, "worse than homeless," and the reference to +domestic distractions, appear to indicate that some estrangement had +already set in between Coleridge and his wife. De Quincey's testimony +to its existence at the time (a month or so later) when he made +Coleridge's acquaintance may, subject to the usual deductions, be +accepted as trustworthy; and, of course, for aught we know, it may +then have been already of some years' standing. That the provocation +to it on the husband's part may be so far antedated is at least a +reasonable conjecture. There may be nothing – in all likelihood there +is nothing – worth attention in De Quincey's gossip about the young +lady, "intellectually very much superior to Mrs. Coleridge, who +became a neighbour and daily companion of Coleridge's walks" at +Keswick. But if there be no foundation for his remarks on "the +mischiefs of a situation which exposed Mrs. Coleridge to an invidious +comparison with a more intellectual person," there is undoubtedly +plenty of point in the immediately following observation that "it +was most unfortunate for Coleridge himself to be continually +compared with one so ideally correct and regular in his habits as Mr. +Southey." The passion of female jealousy assuredly did not need to be +called into play to account for the alienation of Mrs. Coleridge from +her husband. Mrs. Carlyle has left on record her pathetic lament over +the fate of a woman who marries a man of genius; but a man of genius of +the coldly selfish and exacting type of the Chelsea philosopher would +probably be a less severe burden to a woman of housewifely instincts +than the weak, unmethodical, irresolute, shiftless being that Coleridge +had by this time become. After the arrival of the Southeys, Mrs. +Coleridge would indeed have been more than human if she had not looked +with an envious eye upon the contrast between her sister Edith's lot +and her own. For this would give her the added pang of perceiving that +she was specially unlucky in the matter, and that men of genius could +("if they chose," as she would probably, though not perhaps quite +justly have put it) make very good husbands indeed. If one poet could +finish his poems, and pay his tradesmen's bills, and work steadily for +the publishers in his own house without the necessity of periodical +flittings to various parts of the United Kingdom or the Continent, why, +so could another. With such reflections as these Mrs. Coleridge's mind +was no doubt sadly busy during the early years of her residence at the +Lakes, and, since their causes did not diminish but rather increased in +intensity as time went on, the estrangement between them – or rather, to +do Coleridge justice, her estrangement from her husband – had, by 1806, +no doubt become complete. The fatal habit which even up to this time +seems to have been unknown to most of his friends could hardly have +been a secret to his wife, and his four or five years of slavery to it +may well have worn out her patience.</p> + +<p>This single cause indeed, namely, Coleridge's addiction to opium, is +quite sufficient, through the humiliations, discomfort, and privations, +pecuniary and otherwise, for which the vice was no doubt mediately or +immediately responsible, to account for the unhappy issue of a union +which undoubtedly was one of love to begin with, and which seems to +have retained that character for at least six years of its course. +We have noted the language of warm affection in which the "beloved +Sara" is spoken of in the early poems, and up to the time of +Coleridge's stay in Germany his feelings towards his wife remained +evidently unchanged. To his children, of whom three out of the four +born to him had survived, he was deeply attached; and the remarkable +promise displayed by the eldest son, Hartley, and his youngest child +and only daughter, Sara, made them objects of no less interest to his +intellect than to his heart. "Hartley," he writes to Mr. Poole in +1803, "is a strange, strange boy, exquisitely wild, an utter +visionary; like the moon among thin clouds, he moves in a circle +of light of his own making. He alone is a light of his own." And of his +daughter in the same poetic strain: "My meek little Sara is a +remarkably interesting baby, with the finest possible skin, and large +blue eyes, and she smiles as if she were basking in a sunshine as mild +as moonlight of her own quiet happiness." Derwent, a less remarkable +but no less attractive child than his brother and sister (whom he was +destined long to survive), held an equal place in his father's +affections. Yet all these interwoven influences – a deep love of his +children and a sincere attachment to his wife, of whom, indeed, he +never ceased to speak with respect and regard – were as powerless as in +so many thousands of other cases they have been, to brace an enfeebled +will to the task of self-reform. In 1807 "respect and regard" had +manifestly taken the place of any warmer feeling in his mind. Later on +in the letter above quoted he says, "In less than a week I go down to +Ottery, with my children and their mother, from a sense of duty" +(<i>i.e.</i> to his brother, the Rev. George Coleridge, who had +succeeded his father as head master of the Ottery St. Mary Grammar +School) "as far as it affects myself, and from a promise made to Mrs. +Coleridge, as far as it affects her, and indeed of a debt of respect to +her for her many praiseworthy qualities." When husbands and wives take +to liquidating debts of this kind, and in this spirit, it is pretty +conclusive evidence that all other accounts between them are +closed.</p> + +<p>The letter from which these extracts have been taken was +written from Aisholt near Bridgewater, where Coleridge was then +staying, with his wife and children, as the guest of a Mr. Price; and +his friend Poole's description to Josiah Wedgwood of his state at that +time is significant as showing that some at least of his intimate +acquaintances had no suspicion of the real cause of his bodily and +mental disorders. "I admire him," Poole writes, "and pity him more than +ever. His information is much extended, the <i>great</i> qualities of +his mind heightened and better disciplined, but alas! his health is +much weaker, and his great failing, procrastination, or the +incapability of acting agreeably to his wish and will, much +increased."</p> + +<p>Whether the promised visit to Ottery St. Mary was ever paid there is +no record to show, but at the end of July 1807 we again hear of the +Coleridges at the house of a Mr. Chubb, a descendant of the Deist, at +Bridgewater; and here it was that De Quincey, after having endeavoured +in vain to run the poet to earth at Stowey, where he had been staying +with Mr. Poole, and whence he had gone to pay a short visit to Lord +Egmont, succeeded in obtaining an introduction to him. The +characteristic passage in which the younger man describes their +first meeting is too long for quotation, and it is to be hoped too well +known to need it: his vivid and acute criticism of Coleridge's +conversation may be more appropriately cited hereafter. His evidence as +to the conjugal relations of Coleridge and his wife has been already +discussed; and the last remaining point of interest about this +memorable introduction is the testimony which it incidentally affords +to De Quincey's genuine and generous instinct of hero-worship, and to +the depth of Coleridge's pecuniary embarrassments. The loan of £300, +which the poet's enthusiastic admirer insisted on Cottle's conveying to +him as from an unknown "young man of fortune who admired his talents," +should cover a multitude of De Quincey's subsequent sins. It was indeed +only upon Cottle's urgent representation that he had consented to +reduce the sum from £500 to £300. Nor does there seem any doubt of his +having honestly attempted to conceal his own identity with the nameless +benefactor, though, according to his own later account, he failed. +[<a href="#foot_6-1">1</a>]</p> + +<p>This occurred in November 1807, and in the previous month De +Quincey had been able to render Coleridge a minor service, while at the +same moment gratifying a long cherished wish of his own. Mrs. Coleridge +was about to return with her children to Keswick, but her husband, not +yet master of this £300 windfall, and undoubtedly at his wits' end for +money, was arranging for a course of lectures to be delivered at the +Royal Institution early in the ensuing year, and could not accompany +them. De Quincey offered accordingly to be their escort, and duly +conducted them to Wordsworth's house, thus making the acquaintance of +the second of his two great poetical idols within a few months of +paying his first homage to the other. In February 1808 Coleridge again +took up his abode in London at his old free quarters in the +<i>Courier</i> office, and began the delivery of a promised series of +sixteen lectures on Poetry and the Fine Arts. "I wish you could see +him," again writes Poole to Wedgwood, "you would pity and admire. He is +much improved, but has still less voluntary power than ever. Yet he is +so committed that I think he must deliver these lectures." Considering +that the authorities of the Royal Institution had agreed to pay him one +hundred guineas for delivering the lectures, he undoubtedly was more or +less "committed;" and his voluntary power, however small, might be +safely supposed to be equal to the task of fulfilling a contract. But +to get the lecturer into the lecture-room does not amount to much more +than bringing the horse to the water. You can no more make the one +drink than you can prevent the other from sending his audience away +thirsty. Coleridge's lectures on Poetry and the Fine Arts were +confused, ill arranged, and generally disappointing to the last degree. +Sometimes it was not even possible to bring the horse to the water. +Charles Lamb writes to Manning on the 20th of February 1808 (early days +indeed) that Coleridge had only delivered two lectures, and that though +"two more were intended, he did not come." De Quincey writes of +"dismissals of audience after audience, with pleas of illness; and on +many of his lecture-days I have seen all Albemarle Street closed by a +lock of carriages filled with women of distinction, until the servants +of the Institution or their own footmen advanced to the carriage-doors +with the intelligence that Mr. Coleridge had been suddenly taken ill." +Naturally there came a time when the "women of distinction" began to +tire of this treatment. "The plea, which at first had been received +with expressions of concern, repeated too often began to rouse disgust. +Many in anger, and some in real uncertainty whether it would not be +trouble thrown away, ceased to attend." And what De Quincey has to say +of the lectures themselves when they did by chance get delivered is no +less melancholy. "The lecturer's appearance," he says, "was generally +that of a man struggling with pain and over-mastering illness."</p> + +<p>"His lips were baked with feverish heat, and often black in colour; and +in spite of the water which he continued drinking through the whole +course of the lecture, he often seemed to labour under an almost paralytic +inability to raise the upper jaw from the lower" [<i>i.e.</i> I suppose +to move the lower jaw]. "In such a state it is clear that nothing could +save the lecture itself from reflecting his own feebleness and +exhaustion except the advantage of having been precomposed in some +happier mood. But that never happened: most unfortunately, he relied on +his extempore ability to carry him through. Now, had he been in +spirits, or had he gathered animation and kindled by his own emotion, +no written lecture could have been more effectual than one of his +unpremeditated colloquial harangues. But either he was depressed +originally below the point from which reascent was possible, or else +this reaction was intercepted by continual disgust from looking back +upon his own ill success; for assuredly he never once recovered that +free and eloquent movement of thought which he could command at any +time in a private company. The passages he read, moreover, in +illustrating his doctrines, were generally unhappily chosen, because +chosen at haphazard, from the difficulty of finding at a moment's +summons these passages which his purpose required. Nor do I remember +any that produced much effect except two or three which I myself put +ready marked into his hands among the <i>Metrical Romances</i>, edited +by Ritson. Generally speaking, the selections were as injudicious and +as inappropriate as they were ill delivered, for among Coleridge's +accomplishments good reading was not one. He had neither voice (so at +least I thought) nor management of voice. This defect is unfortunate in +a public lecturer, for it is inconceivable how much weight and +effectual pathos can be communicated by sonorous depth and melodious +cadence of the human voice to sentiments the most trivial; [<a href="#foot_6-2">2</a>] nor, on +the other hand, how the grandest are emasculated by a style of reading +which fails in distributing the lights and shadows of a musical +intonation. However, this defect chiefly concerned the immediate +impression; the most afflicting to a friend of Coleridge's was the +entire absence of his own peculiar and majestic intellect; no heart, no +soul, was in anything he said; no strength of feeling in recalling +universal truths, no power of originality or compass of moral +relations in his novelties, – all was a poor, faint reflection from +pearls once scattered on the highway by himself in the prodigality of +his early opulence – a mendicant dependence on the alms dropped from his +own overflowing treasury of happier times."</p> + +<p>Severe as is this censure of the lectures, there is unhappily no good +ground for disputing its substantial justice. And the inferences which +it suggests are only too painfully plain. One can well understand +Coleridge's being an ineffective lecturer, and no failure in this +respect, however conspicuous, would necessarily force us to the +hypothesis of physical disability. But a Coleridge who could no more +compose a lecture than he could deliver one-a Coleridge who could +neither write nor extemporise anything specially remarkable on a +subject so congenial to him as that of English poetry – must +assuredly have spent most of his time, whether in the lecture-room or +out of it, in a state of incapacity for sustained intellectual effort. +De Quincey's humorous account of the lecturer's shiftless untidy life +at the Courier office, and even the Rabelaisian quip which Charles +Lamb throws at it in the above-quoted letter to Manning, are +sufficient indications of his state at this time. "Oh, Charles," +he writes to Lamb, early in February, just before the course of +lectures was to begin, "I am very, very ill. <i>Vixi.</i>" The sad +truth is that, as seems to have been always the case with him when +living alone, he was during these months of his residence in London +more constantly and hopelessly under the dominion of opium than ever.</p> + +<blockquote style="font-variant: small-caps"><strong>Footnotes</strong></blockquote> + +<p><a name="foot_6-1"></a>1. "In a letter written by him (Coleridge) about fifteen years after +that time, I found that he had become aware of all the circumstances, +perhaps through some indiscretion of Mr. Cottle's." Perhaps, however, +no very great indiscretion on Mr. Cottle's part was needed to enable +Coleridge to trace the loan to so ardent a young admirer and disciple.</p> + +<p><a name="foot_6-2"></a>2. The justice of this criticism will be acknowledged by those many +persons whom Mr. Bright's great elocutionary skill has occasionally +deluded into imagining that the very commonplace verse which the famous +orator has been often known to quote with admiration is poetry of a +high order.</p> + + + +<a name="chap7"></a> +<h2>Chapter VII</h2> + +<blockquote>Return to the Lakes – From Keswick to Grasmere – With Wordsworth at Allan +Bank – The <i>Friend</i> – Quits the Lake country for ever.</blockquote> + +<p style="text-align: center">[1809-1810.]</p> + +<p>From the close of this series of lectures in the month of May 1808 +until the end of the year it is impossible to trace Coleridge's +movements or even to determine the nature of his occupation with any +approach to exactitude. The probability is, however, that he remained +in London at his lodgings in the <i>Courier</i> office, and that he +supported himself by rendering assistance in various ways to Mr. Daniel +Stuart. We know nothing of him, however, with certainty until we find +him once more at the Lakes in the early part of the year 1809, but not +in his own home. Wordsworth had removed from his former abode at +Grasmere to Allan Bank, a larger house some three-quarters of a mile +distant, and there Coleridge took up his residence, more, it would +seem, as a permanent inmate of his friend's house than as a guest. The +specific cause of this migration from Greta Hall to Allan Bank does not +appear, but all the accessible evidence, contemporary and subsequent, +seems to point to the probability that it was the result of a definite +break-up of Coleridge's own home. He continued, at any rate, to reside +in Wordsworth's house during the whole seven months of his editorship +of the <i>Friend</i>, a new venture in periodical literature which he +undertook at this period; and we shall see that upon its failure he did +not resume his residence at Greta Hall, but quitted the Lake country at +once and for ever.</p> + +<p>We need not take too literally Coleridge's declaration in the <i>Biographia +Literaria</i> that one "main object of his in starting the <i>Friend</i> +was to establish the philosophical distinction between the Reason and +the Understanding." Had this been so, or at least had the periodical +been actually conducted in conformity with any such purpose, even the +chagrined projector himself could scarcely have had the face to +complain, as Coleridge did very bitterly, of the reception accorded to +it by the public. The most unpractical of thinkers can hardly have +imagined that the "general reader" would "take in" a weekly metaphysical +journal published at a town in Cumberland. The <i>Friend</i> was not +quite so essentially hopeless an enterprise as that would have been; +but the accidents of mismanagement and imprudence soon made it, for +all practical purposes, sufficiently desperate. Even the forlorn +<i>Watchman</i>, which had been set on foot when Coleridge had fourteen +years' less experience of the world, was hardly more certainly +foredoomed. The first care of the founder of the <i>Friend</i> was to +select, as the place of publication, a town exactly twenty-eight miles +from his own abode – a distance virtually trebled, as De Quincey +observes, "by the interposition of Kirkstone, a mountain only to be +scaled by a carriage ascent of three miles, and so steep in parts that +without four horses no solitary traveller can persuade the neighbouring +innkeepers to convey him." Here, however, at Penrith, "by way of +purchasing intolerable difficulties at the highest price," Coleridge was +advised and actually persuaded to set up a printer, to buy and lay in a +stock of paper, types, etc., instead of resorting to some printer already +established at a nearer place – as, for instance, Kendal, which was ten +miles nearer, and connected with Coleridge's then place of residence by +a daily post, whereas at Penrith there was no post at all. Having thus +studiously and severely handicapped himself, the projector of the new +periodical set to work, upon the strength of what seems to have been in +great measure a fancy list of subscribers, to print and, so far as his +extraordinary arrangements permitted, to circulate his journal. With +<i>naïve</i> sententiousness he warns the readers of the <i>Biographia +Literaria</i> against trusting, in their own case, to such a guarantee +as he supposed himself to possess. "You cannot," he observes, "be certain +that the names on a subscription list have been put down by sufficient +authority; or, should that be ascertained, it still remains to be known +whether they were not extorted by some over-zealous friend's +importunity; whether the subscriber had not yielded his name merely +from want of courage to say no! and with the intention of dropping the +work as soon as possible." Thus out of a hundred patrons who had been +obtained for the <i>Friend</i> by an energetic canvasser, "ninety threw +up the publication before the fourth number without any notice, though +it was well known to them that in consequence of the distance and the +slowness and irregularity of the conveyance" [it is amusing to observe +the way in which Coleridge notes these drawbacks of his own creation as +though they were "the act of God"] "I was compelled to lay in a stock +of stamped paper for at least eight weeks beforehand, each sheet of +which stood me in fivepence previous to its arrival at my printer's; +though the subscription money was not to be received till the twenty-first week after the commencement of the work; and, lastly, though it +was in nine cases out of ten impracticable for me to receive the money +for two or three numbers without paying an equal sum for the postage."</p> + +<p>Enough appears in this undesignedly droll account of the +venture to show pretty clearly that, even had the <i>Friend</i> +obtained a reasonable measure of popularity at starting, the flagrant +defects in the methods of distributing and financing it must have +insured its early decease. But, as a matter of fact, it had no chance +of popularity from the outset. Its first number appeared on 1st August +1809, and Coleridge, writing to Southey on 20th October of the same +year, speaks of his "original apprehension" that the plan and execution +of the <i>Friend</i> is so utterly unsuitable to the public taste as to +preclude all rational hopes of its success. "Much," he continues, +"might have been done to have made the former numbers less so, by the +interposition of others written more expressly for general interest;" +and he promises to do his best in future to "interpose tales and whole +numbers of amusement, which will make the periods lighter and shorter." +Meanwhile he begs Southey to write a letter to the <i>Friend</i> in a +lively style, rallying its editor on "his Quixotism in expecting that +the public will ever pretend to understand his lucubrations or feel any +interest in subjects of such sad and unkempt antiquity." Southey, ever +good-natured, complied, even amid the unceasing press of his work, with +the request; and to the letter of lightly-touched satire which he +contributed to the journal he added a few private lines of friendly +counsel, strongly urging Coleridge to give two or three amusing +numbers, and he would hear of admiration on every side. "Insert too," +he suggested, "a few more poems – any that you have, except <i>Christabel</i>, +for that is of too much value. And write <i>now</i> that character of +Bonaparte, announced in former times for 'to-morrow, and to-morrow, +and to-morrow.'" It was too late, however, for good advice to be of +any avail: the <i>Friend</i> was past praying for. It lingered on +till its twenty-eighth number, and expired, unlike the Watchman, +without any farewell to its friends, in the third week of March 1810.</p> + +<p>The republication of this periodical, or rather selections +from it, which appeared in 1818, is hardly perhaps described with +justice in De Quincey's words as "altogether and absolutely a new +work." A reader can, at any rate, form a pretty fair estimate from it +of the style and probable public attractions of the original issue; and +a perusal of it, considered in its character as a bid for the patronage +of the general reader, is certainly calculated to excite an +astonishment too deep for words. We have, of course, to bear in mind +that the standard of the readable in our grandfathers' days was a more +liberal and tolerant one than it is in our own. In those days of +leisurely communications and slowly moving events there was relatively +at least a far larger public for a weekly issue of moral and +philosophical essays, under the name of a periodical, than it would be +found easy to secure at present, when even a monthly discourse upon +things in general requires Mr. Euskin's brilliancy of eloquence, +vivacity of humour, and perpetual charm of unexpectedness to carry it +off. Still the <i>Spectator</i> continued to be read in Coleridge's +day, and people therefore must have had before them a perpetual example +of what it was possible to do in the way of combining entertainment +with instruction. How, then, it could have entered into the mind of the +most sanguine projector to suppose that the <i>longueurs</i> and the +difficulty of the <i>Friend</i> would be patiently borne with for the +sake of the solid nutriment which it contained it is quite impossible +to understand. Even supposing that a weekly, whose avowed object was +"to aid in the formation of fixed principles in politics, morals, and +religion," could possibly be floated, even "with literary amusements +interspersed," it is evident that very much would depend upon the +character of these "amusements" themselves. In the republication of +1817 they appear under the heading of "landing-places." One of them +consists of a parallel between Voltaire and Erasmus, and between +Rousseau and Luther, founded, of course, on the respective attitudes of +the two pairs of personages to the Revolution and the Reformation. +Another at the end of the series consists of a criticism of, and +panegyric on, Sir Alexander Ball, the governor of Malta. Such are the +landing-places. But how should any reader, wearied with "for ever +climbing up the climbing wave" of Coleridge's eloquence, have found +rest or refreshment on one of these uncomfortable little sandbanks? It +was true that the original issue of the <i>Friend</i> contained +poetical contributions which do not appear in the republication; but +poetry in itself, or, at any rate, good poetry, is not a relief to the +overstrained faculties, and, even if it were, the relief would have +been provided at too infrequent intervals to affect the general result. +The fact is, however, that Coleridge's own theory of his duty as a +public instructor was in itself fatal to any hope of his venture +proving a commercial success. Even when entreated by Southey to lighten +the character of the periodical, he accompanies his admission of the +worldly wisdom of the advice with something like a protest against such +a departure from the severity of his original plan. His object, as he +puts it with much cogency from his own unpractical point of view – his +object being to teach men how to think on politics, religion, and +morals, and thinking being a very arduous and distasteful business to +the mass of mankind, it followed that the essays of the <i>Friend</i> +(and particularly the earlier essays, in which the reader required to +be "grounded" in his subject) could hardly be agreeable reading. With +perfect frankness indeed does he admit in his prospectus that he must +"submit to be thought dull by those who seek amusement only." He hoped, +however, as he says in one of his earlier essays, to become livelier as +he went on. "The proper merit of a foundation is its massiveness and +solidity. The conveniences and ornaments, the gilding and stucco-work, +the sunshine and sunny prospects, will come with the superstructure." +But the building, alas! was never destined to be completed, and the +architect had his own misgivings about the attractions even of the +completed edifice. "I dare not flatter myself that any endeavours of +mine, compatible with the duty I owe to the truth and the hope of +permanent utility, will render the <i>Friend</i> agreeable to the +majority of what is called the reading public. I never expected it. How +indeed could I when, etc." Yet, in spite of these professions, it is +clear from the prospectus that Coleridge believed in the possibility of +obtaining a public for the <i>Friend</i>. He says that "a motive for +honourable ambition was supplied by the fact that every periodical +paper of the kind now attempted, which had been conducted with zeal and +ability, was not only well received at the time, but has become +popular;" and he seems to regard it as a comparatively unimportant +circumstance that the <i>Friend</i> would be distinguished from "its +celebrated predecessors, the <i>Spectator</i> and the like," by the +"greater length of the separate essays, by their closer connection with +each other, and by the predominance of one object, and the common +bearing of all to one end." It was, of course, exactly this <i>plus</i> +of prolixity and <i>minus</i> of variety which lowered the sum of the +<i>Friend's</i> attractions so far below that of the <i>Spectator</i> +as to deprive the success of Addison of all its value as a +precedent.</p> + +<p>Nor is it easy to agree with the editor of the reprint of +1837 that the work, "with all its imperfections, is perhaps the most +vigorous" of its author's compositions. That there are passages in it +which impress us by their force of expression, as well as by subtlety +or beauty of thought, must of course be admitted. It was impossible to +a man of Coleridge's literary power that it should be otherwise. But +"vigorous" is certainly not the adjective which seems to me to suggest +itself to an impartial critic of these too copious disquisitions. +Making every allowance for their necessary elasticity of scope as being +designed to "prepare and discipline the student's moral and +intellectual being, not to propound dogmas and theories for his +adoption," it must, I think, be allowed that they are wanting in that +continuity of movement and co-ordination of parts which, as it seems to +me, enters into any intelligible definition of "vigour," as attributed +to a work of moral and political exposition considered as a whole. The +writer's discursiveness is too often and too vexatiously felt by the +reader to permit of the survival of any sense of theorematic unity in +his mind; he soon gives up all attempts at periodical measurement of +his own and his author's progress towards the prescribed goal of their +journey; and he resigns himself in this, as in so many other of +Coleridge's prose works, to a study of isolated and detached passages. +So treated, however, one may freely admit that the <i>Friend</i> is +fully worthy of the admiration with which Mr. H. N. Coleridge regarded +it. If not the most vigorous, it is beyond all comparison the most +characteristic of all his uncle's performances in this field of his +multiform activity. In no way could the peculiar pregnancy of +Coleridge's thoughts, the more than scholastic subtlety of his +dialectic, and the passionate fervour of his spirituality be more +impressively exhibited than by a well-made selection of <i>loci</i> +from the pages of the <i>Friend</i>.</p> + + + +<a name="chap8"></a> +<h2>Chapter VIII</h2> + +<blockquote>London again – Second recourse to journalism – The <i>Courier</i> +articles – The Shakespeare lectures – Production of <i>Remorse</i> – At +Bristol again as lecturer – Residence at Calne – Increasing ill health +and embarrassment – Retirement to Mr. Gillman's.</blockquote> + +<p style="text-align: center">[1810-1816.]</p> + +<p>The life led by Coleridge during the six years next ensuing is +difficult to trace, even in the barest outline; to give a detailed and +circumstantial account of it from any ordinarily accessible source of +information is impossible. Nor is it, I imagine, very probable that +even the most exhaustive search among whatever imprinted records may +exist in the possession of his friends would at all completely supply +the present lack of biographical material. For not only had it become +Coleridge's habit to disappear from the sight of his kinsmen and +acquaintances for long periods together; he had fallen almost wholly +silent also. They not only ceased to see him, but they ceased to hear +of him. Letters addressed to him, even on subjects of the greatest +importance, would remain for months unnoticed, and in many instances +would receive no answer at all. His correspondence during the next +half-dozen years must have been of the scantiest amount and the most +intermittent character, and a biographer could hope, therefore, for +but little aid in bridging over the large gaps in his knowledge of +this period, even if every extant letter written by Coleridge during +its continuance were to be given to the world.</p> + +<p>Such light, too, as is retrospectively thrown upon it by Coleridge's +correspondence of a later date is of the most fitful description, – +scarcely more than serves, in fact, for the rendering of darkness +visible. Even the sudden and final departure from the Lakes it leaves +involved in as much obscurity as ever. Writing to Mr. Thomas Allsop +[<a href="#foot_8-1">1</a>] from Ramsgate twelve years afterwards (8th October 1822) he says +that he "counts four grasping and griping sorrows in his past life." +The first of these "was when" [no date given] "the vision of a happy +home sank for ever, and it became impossible for me longer even to +hope for domestic happiness under the name of husband." That is plain +enough on the whole, though it still leaves us in some uncertainty as +to whether the "sinking of the vision" was as gradual as the +estrangement between husband and wife, or whether he refers to some +violent rupture of relations with Mrs. Coleridge, possibly +precipitating his departure from the Lakes. If soothe second "griping +and grasping sorrow" followed very quickly on the first, for he says +that it overtook him "on the night of his arrival from Grasmere with +Mr. and Mrs. Montagu;" while in the same breath and paragraph, and as +though undoubtedly referring to the same thing, he speaks of the +"destruction of a friendship of fifteen years when, just at the moment +of Tenner and Curtis's (the publishers) bankruptcy" (by which +Coleridge was a heavy loser, but which did not occur till seven years +afterwards), somebody indicated by seven asterisks and possessing an +income of £1200 a-year, was "totally transformed into baseness." There +is certainly not much light here, any more than in the equally +enigmatical description of the third sorrow as being "in some sort +included in the second," so that "what the former was to friendship +the latter was to a still more inward bond." The truth is, that all +Coleridge's references to himself in his later years are shrouded in a +double obscurity. One veil is thrown over them by his deliberate +preference for abstract and mystical forms of expression, and another +perhaps by that kind of shameful secretiveness which grows upon all +men who become the slaves of concealed indulgences, and which often +displays itself on occasions when it has no real object to gain of any +kind whatever.</p> + +<p>Thus much only we know, that on reaching London in the summer of 1810 +Coleridge became the guest of the Montagus, and that, after some +months' residence with them, he left as the immediate result of some +difference with his host which was never afterwards composed. Whether +it arose from the somewhat trivial cause to which De Quincey has, +admittedly upon the evidence of "the learned in literary scandal," +referred it, it is now impossible to say. But at some time or other, +towards the close probably of 1810, or in the early months of 1811, +Coleridge quitted Mr. Montagu's house for that of Mr. John Morgan, a +companion of his early Bristol days, and a common friend of his and +Southey's; and here, at No. 7 Portland Place, Hammersmith, he was +residing when, for the second time, he resolved to present himself to +the London public in the capacity of lecturer. His services were on +this occasion engaged by the London Philosophical Society, at Crane +Court, Fleet Street, and their prospectus announced that on Monday, +18th November, Mr. Coleridge would commence "a course of lectures on +Shakspeare and Milton, in illustration of the principles of poetry and +their application, on grounds of criticism, to the most popular works +of later English poets, those of the living included. After an +introductory lecture on false criticism (especially in poetry) and on +its causes, two-thirds of the remaining course," continues the +prospectus, "will be assigned, 1st, to a philosophical analysis and +explanation of all the principal characters of our great dramatists, +as Othello, Falstaff, Richard the Third, Lago, Hamlet, etc., and to a +critical comparison of Shakspeare in respect of diction, imagery, +management of the passions, judgment in the construction of his +dramas – in short, of all that belongs to him as a poet, and as a +dramatic poet, with his contemporaries or immediate successors, +Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Ford, Massinger, and in the endeavour +to determine which of Shakespeare's merits and defects are common to +him, with other writers of the same age, and what remain peculiar to +his genius."</p> + +<p>A couple of months before the commencement of this course, viz. in +September 1811, Coleridge seems to have entered into a definite +journalistic engagement with his old editor, Mr. Daniel Stuart, then +the proprietor of the <i>Courier</i>. It was not, however, his first +connection with that journal. He had already published at least one +piece of verse in its columns, and two years before, while the +<i>Friend</i> was still in existence, he had contributed to it a +series of letters on the struggle of the Spaniards against their +French invaders. In these, as though to show that under the ashes of +his old democratic enthusiasm still lived its wonted fires, and that +the inspiration of a popular cause was only needed to reanimate them, +we find, with less of the youthful lightness of touch and agility of +movement, a very near approach to the vigour of his early journalistic +days. Whatever may be thought of the historic value of the parallel +which he institutes between the struggle of the Low Countries against +their tyrant, and that of the Peninsula against its usurping +conqueror, it is worked out with remarkable ingenuity of completeness. +Whole pages of the letters are radiant with that steady flame of +hatred which, ever since the hour of his disillusionment, had glowed +in his breast at the name and thought of Bonaparte; and whenever he +speaks of the Spaniards, of Spanish patriotism, of the Spanish Cortes, +we see that the names of "the people," of "freedom," of "popular +assembly," have some of their old magic for him still. The following +passage is almost pathetic in its reminder of the days of 1792, before +that modern Leonidas, the young French Republic, had degenerated into +the Xerxes of the Empire.</p> + +<p>"The power which raised up, established, and enriched the Dutch +republic, – the same mighty power is no less at work in the present +struggle of the Spanish nation, a power which mocks the calculations +of ordinary statecraft too subtle to be weighed against it, and mere +outward brute force too different from it to admit of comparison. A +power as mighty in the rational creation as the element of electricity +in the material world; and, like that element, infinite in its +affinities, infinite in its mode of action, combining the most +discordant natures, fixing the most volatile, and arming the sluggish +vapour of the marsh with arrows of fire; working alike in silence and +in tempest, in growth and in destruction; now contracted to an +individual soul, and now, as in a moment, dilating itself over a whole +nation! Am I asked what this mighty power may be, and wherein it +exists? If we are worthy of the fame which we possess as the +countrymen of Hampden, Russell, and Algernon Sidney, we shall find the +answer in our own hearts. It is the power of the insulted free-will, +steadied by the approving conscience and struggling against brute +force and iniquitous compulsion for the common rights of human nature, +brought home to our inmost souls by being, at the same time, the +rights of our betrayed, insulted, and bleeding country."</p> + +<p>And as this passage recalls the most striking characteristics of his +earlier style, so may its conclusion serve as a fair specimen of the +calmer eloquence of his later manner: – </p> + +<p>"It is a painful truth, sir, that these men who appeal most to facts, +and pretend to take them for their exclusive guide, are the very +persons who most disregard the light of experience when it refers them +to the mightiness of their own inner nature, in opposition to those +forces which they can see with their eyes, and reduce to figures upon +a slate. And yet, sir, what is history for the greater and more useful +part but a voice from the sepulchres of our forefathers, assuring us, +from their united experience, that our spirits are as much stronger +than our bodies as they are nobler and more permanent? The historic +muse appears in her loftiest character as the nurse of Hope. It is her +appropriate praise that her records enable the magnanimous to silence +the selfish and cowardly by appealing to actual events for the +information of these truths which they themselves first learned from +the surer oracle of their own reason."</p> + +<p>But this reanimation of energy was but a transient phenomenoa It did +not survive the first freshness of its exciting cause. The Spanish +insurrection grew into the Peninsular war, and though the glorious +series of Wellington's victories might well, one would think, have +sustained the rhetorical temperature at its proper pitch, it failed to +do so. Or was it, as the facts appear now and then to suggest, that +Coleridge at Grasmere or Keswick-Coleridge in the inspiring (and +restraining) companionship of close friends and literary compeers – was +an altogether different man from Coleridge in London, alone with his +thoughts and his opium? The question cannot be answered with +confidence, and the fine quality of the lectures on Shakespeare is +sufficient to show that, for some time, at any rate, after his final +migration to London, his critical faculty retained its full vigour. +But it is beyond dispute that his regular contributions to the +<i>Courier</i> in 1811-12 are not only vastly inferior to his articles +of a dozen years before in the <i>Morning Post</i> but fall sensibly +short of the level of the letters of 1809, from which extract has just +been made. Their tone is spiritless, and they even lack distinction of +style. Their very subjects, and the mode of treating them, appear to +show a change in Coleridge's attitude towards public affairs if not in +the very conditions of his journalistic employment. They have much +more of the character of newspaper hack-work than his earlier +contributions. He seems to have been, in many instances, set to write +a mere report, and often a rather dry and mechanical report of this or +the other Peninsular victory. He seldom or never discusses the +political situation, as his wont had been, <i>au large</i>; and in +place of broad statesmanlike reflection on the scenes and actors in +the great world-drama then in progress, we meet with too much of that +sort of criticism on the consistency and capacity of "our +contemporary, the <i>Morning Chronicle</i>," which had less attraction, +it may be suspected, even for the public of its own day than +for the journalistic profession, while for posterity, of course, +it possesses no interest at all. The series of contributions extends +from September of 1811 until April of the following year, and appears +to have nearly come to a premature and abrupt close in the +intermediate July, when an article written by Coleridge in strong +opposition to the proposed reinstatement of the Duke of York in the +command-in-chief was, by ministerial influence, suppressed before +publication. This made Coleridge, as his daughter informs us on the +authority of Mr. Crabb Kobinson, "very uncomfortable," and he was +desirous of being engaged on another paper. He wished to be connected +with the <i>Times</i>, and "I spoke," says Mr. Eobinson, "with Walter +on the subject, but the negotiation failed."</p> + +<p>With the conclusion of the lectures on Shakespeare, and the loss of +the stimulus, slight as it then was to him, of regular duties and +recurring engagements, Coleridge seems to have relapsed once more into +thoroughly desultory habits of work. The series of aphorisms and +reflections which he contributed in 1812 to Southey's <i>Omniana</i>, +witty, suggestive, profound as many of them are, must not of course be +referred to the years in which they were given to the world. They +belong unquestionably to the order of <i>marginalia</i>, the scattered +notes of which De Quincey speaks with not extravagant admiration, and +which, under the busy pencil of a commentator always indefatigable in +the <i>strenua inertia</i> of reading, had no doubt accumulated in +considerable quantities over a long course of years.</p> + +<p>The disposal, however, of this species of literary material could +scarcely have been a source of much profit to him, and Coleridge's +difficulties of living must by this time have been growing acute. His +pension from the Wedgwoods had been assigned, his surviving son has +stated, to the use of his family, and even this had been in the +previous year reduced by half. "In Coleridge's neglect," observes Miss +Meteyard, "of his duties to his wife, his children, and his friends, +must be sought the motives which led Mr. Wedgwood in 1811 to withdraw +his share of the annuity. An excellent, even over-anxious father, he +was likely to be shocked at a neglect which imposed on the generosity +of Southey, himself heavily burdened, those duties which every man of +feeling and honour proudly and even jealously guards as his own.... +The pension of £150 per annum had been originally granted with the +view to secure Coleridge independence and leisure while he effected +some few of his manifold projects of literary work. But ten years had +passed, and these projects were still <i>in nubibus</i> – even the life +of Leasing, even the briefer memoir of Thomas Wedgwood; and gifts so +well intentioned, had as it were, ministered to evil rather than to +good." We can hardly wonder at the step, however we may regret it; and +if one of the reasons adduced in defence of it savours somewhat of the +fallacy known as <i>... non causé, pro causé</i>, we may perhaps +attribute that rather to the maladroitness of Miss Meteyard's advocacy +than to the weakness of Mr. Wedgwood's logic. The fact, however, that +this "excellent, even over-anxious father" was shocked at a neglect +which imposed a burden on the generosity of Southey, is hardly a just +ground for cutting off one of the supplies by which that burden was +partially relieved. As to the assignment of the pension to the family, +it is impossible to question what has been positively affirmed by an +actual member of that family, the Rev. Derwent Coleridge himself; +though, when he adds that not only was the school education of both the +sons provided from this source, but that through his (Coleridge's) +influence they were both sent to college, his statement is at variance, +as will be presently seen, with an authority equal to his own.</p> + +<p>In 1812, at any rate, we may well believe that Coleridge's necessities +had become pressing, and the timely service then rendered to him by +Lord Byron may have been suggested almost as much by a knowledge of +his needs as by admiration for the dramatic merits of his long-since +rejected tragedy. <i>Osorio's</i> time had at any rate come. The +would-be fratricide changed his name to Ordonio, and ceased to stand +sponsor to the play, which was rechristened <i>Remorse</i>, and +accepted at last, upon Byron's recommendation, by the committee of +Drury Lane Theatre, the playhouse at whose doors it had knocked vainly +fifteen years before it was performed there for the first time on the +23d of January 1813. The prologue and epilogue, without which in those +times no gentleman's drama was accounted complete, was written, the +former by Charles Lamb, the latter by the author himself. It obtained +a brilliant success on its first representation, and was honoured with +what was in those days regarded as the very respectable run of twenty +nights.</p> + +<p>The success, however, which came so opportunely for his material +necessities was too late to produce any good effect upon Coleridge's +mental state. But a month after the production of his tragedy we find +him writing in the most dismal strain of hypochondria to Thomas Poole. +The only pleasurable sensation which the success of <i>Remorse</i> had +given him was, he declares, the receipt of his friend's "heart-engendered lines" of congratulation. "No grocer's apprentice, after +his first month's permitted riot, was ever sicker of figs and raisins +than I of hearing about the <i>Remorse</i>. The endless rat-a-tat-tat +at our black-and-blue bruised doors, and my three master-fiends, +proof-sheets, letters, and – worse than these – invitations to large +dinners, which I cannot refuse without offence and imputation of +pride, etc., oppress me so much that my spirits quite sink under it. I +have never seen the play since the first night. It has been a good +thing for the theatre. They will get eight or ten thousand pounds by +it, and I shall get more than by all my literary labours put together + – nay, thrice as much." So large a sum of money as this must have +amounted to should surely have lasted him for years; but the +particular species of intemperance to which he was now hopelessly +enslaved is probably the most costly of all forms of such indulgence, +and it seems pretty evident that the proceeds of his theatrical +<i>coup</i> were consumed in little more than a year.</p> + +<p>Early in 1814, at any rate, Coleridge once more returned to his old +occupation of lecturer, and this time not in London, but in the scene +of his first appearance in that capacity. The lectures which he +proposed to deliver at Bristol were, in fact, a repetition of the +course of 1811-12; but the ways of the lecturer, to judge from an +amusing story recorded by Cottle, more nearly resembled his +proceedings in 1808. A "brother of Mr. George Cumberland," who +happened to be his fellow-traveller to Bristol on this occasion, +relates that before the coach started Coleridge's attention was +attracted by a little Jew boy selling pencils, with whom he entered +into conversation, and with whose superior qualities he was so +impressed as to declare that "if he had not an important engagement at +Bristol he would stay behind to provide some better condition for the +lad." The coach having started, "the gentleman" (for his name was +unknown to the narrator of the incident) "talked incessantly and in a +most entertaining way for thirty miles out of London, and, afterwards, +with little intermission till they reached Marlborough," when he +discovered that a lady in the coach with him was a particular friend +of his; and on arriving at Bath he quitted the coach declaring that he +was determined not to leave her till he had seen her safe to her +brother's door in North Wales. This was the day fixed for the delivery +of Coleridge's first lecture. Two or three days afterwards, having +completed his <i>détour</i> by North Wales, he arrived at Bristol: +another day was fixed for the commencement of the course, and +Coleridge then presented himself an hour after the audience had taken +their seats. The "important engagement" might be broken, it seems, for +a mere whim, though not for a charitable impulse – a distinction +testifying to a mixture of insincerity and unpunctuality not pleasant +to note as an evidence of the then state of Coleridge's emotions and +will.</p> + +<p>Thus inauspiciously commenced, there was no reason why the Bristol +lectures of 1814 should be more successful than the London Institution +lectures of 1808; nor were they, it appears, in fact. They are said to +have been "sparsely attended," – no doubt owing to the natural +unwillingness of people to pay for an hour's contemplation of an empty +platform; and their pecuniary returns in consequence were probably +insignificant. Coleridge remained in Bristol till the month of August, +when he returned to London.</p> + +<p>The painful task of tracing his downward course is now almost +completed. In the middle of this year he touched the lowest point of +his descent. Cottle, who had a good deal of intercourse with him by +speech and letter in 1814, and who had not seen him since 1807, was +shocked by his extreme prostration, and then for the first time +ascertained the cause. "In 1814," he says in his <i>Recollections</i>, +"S. T. C. had been long, very long, in the habit of taking from two +quarts of laudanum a week to a pint a day, and on one occasion he had +been known to take in the twenty-four hours a whole quart of laudanum. +The serious expenditure of money resulting from this habit was the +least evil, though very great, and must have absorbed all the produce +of his writings and lectures and the liberalities of his friends." +Cottle addressed to him a letter of not very delicate remonstrance on +the subject, to which Coleridge replied in his wontedly humble strain.</p> + +<p>There is a certain Pharisaism about the Bristol poet-publisher which +renders it necessary to exercise some little caution in the acceptance +of his account of Coleridge's condition; but the facts, from whatever +source one seeks them, appear to acquit him of any exaggeration in his +summing up of the melancholy matter. "A general impression," he says, +"prevailed on the minds of Coleridge's friends that it was a desperate +case, that paralysed all their efforts; that to assist Coleridge with +money which, under favourable circumstances would have been most +promptly advanced, would now only enlarge his capacity to obtain the +opium which was consuming him. We merely knew that Coleridge had +retired with his friend, Mr. John Morgan, to a small house at Calne in +Wiltshire."</p> + +<p>It must have been at Calne, then, that Coleridge composed the series +of "Letters to Mr. Justice Fletcher concerning his charge to the Grand +Jury of the county of Wexford, at the summer Assizes in 1814," which +appeared at intervals in the <i>Courier</i> between 20th September and +10th December of this year. Their subject, a somewhat injudiciously +animated address to the aforesaid Grand Jury on the subject of the +relations between Catholicism and Protestantism in Ireland, was well +calculated to stimulate the literary activity of a man who always took +something of the keen interest of the modern Radical in the eternal +Irish question; and the letters are not wanting either in +argumentative force or in grave impressiveness of style. But their lack +of spring and energy as compared with Coleridge's earlier work in +journalism is painfully visible throughout.</p> + +<p>Calne, it is to be supposed, was still Coleridge's place of abode when +Southey (17th October) wrote Cottle that letter which appears in his +<i>Correspondence</i>, and which illustrates with such sad completeness +the contrast between the careers of the two generous, romantic, +brilliant youths who had wooed their wives together – and between the +fates, one must add, of the two sisters who had listened to their +wooing – eighteen years before: a letter as honourable to the writer as +it is the reverse to its subject. "Can you," asks Southey, "tell me +anything of Coleridge? A few lines of introduction for a son of Mr.— +of St. James's, in your city, are all that we have received from him +since I saw him last September twelvemonth (1813) in town. The children +being thus left entirely to chance, I have applied to his brothers at +Ottey (Ottery?) concerning them, and am in hopes through their means +and the assistance of other friends of sending Hartley to college. +Lady Beaumont has promised £30 a year for the purpose, and Poole £10. +I wrote to Coleridge three or four months ago, telling him that unless +he took some steps in providing for this object I must make the +application, and required his answer within a given term of three +weeks. He received the letter, and in his note by Mr.— promised to +answer it, but he has never taken any further notice of it. I have +acted with the advice of Wordsworth. The brothers, as I expected, +promise their concurrence, and I daily expect a letter stating to what +extent they will contribute." With this letter before him an impartial +biographer can hardly be expected to adopt the theory which has +commended itself to the filial piety of the Rev. Derwent Coleridge – +namely, that it was through the father's "influence" that the sons +were sent to college. On a plain matter of fact such as this, one may +be permitted, without indelicacy, to uphold the conclusions compelled +by the evidence. Such expressions of opinion, on the other hand, as +that Coleridge's "separation from his family, brought about and +continued through the force of circumstances over which he had far +less control than has been commonly supposed, was in fact nothing else +but an ever-prolonged absence;" and that "from first to last he took +an affectionate, it may be said a passionate, interest in the welfare +of his children" – such expressions of mere opinion as these it may be +proper enough to pass by in respectful silence.</p> + +<p>The following year brought with it no improvement in the embarrassed +circumstances, no reform of the disordered life. Still domiciled with +Mr. Morgan at Calne, the self-made sufferer writes to Cottle: "You +will wish to know something of myself. In health I am not worse than +when at Bristol I was best; yet fluctuating, yet unhappy, in +circumstances poor indeed! I have collected my scattered and my +manuscript poems sufficient to make one volume. Enough I have to make +another. But, till the latter is finished, I cannot, without great loss +of character, publish the former, on account of the arrangement, +besides the necessity of correction. For instance, I earnestly wish to +begin the volumes with what has never been seen by any, however few, +such as a series of odes on the different sentences of the Lord's +Prayer, and, more than all this, to finish my greater work on +'Christianity considered as philosophy, and as the only philosophy.'" +Then follows a request for a loan of forty pounds on the security of +the MSS., an advance which Cottle declined to make, though he sent +Coleridge "some smaller temporary relief." The letter concludes with a +reference to a project for taking a house and receiving pupils to +hoard and instruct, which Cottle appeared to consider the crowning +"degradation and ignominy of all."</p> + +<p>A few days later we find Lord Byron again coming to Coleridge's +assistance with a loan of a hundred pounds and words of counsel and +encouragement. Why should not the author of Remorse repeat his success +I "In Kean," writes Byron, "there is an actor worthy of expressing the +thoughts of the character which you have every power of embodying, and +I cannot but regret that the part of Ordonio was disposed of before +his appearance at Drury Lane. We have had nothing to be mentioned in +the same breath with Remorse for very many years, and I should think +that the reception of that play was sufficient to encourage the +highest hopes of author and audience." The advice was followed, and +the drama of Zapolya was the result. It is a work of even less dramatic +strength than its predecessor, and could scarcely, one thinks, have +been as successful with an audience. It was not, however, destined to +see the footlights. Before it had passed the tribunal of the Drury +Lane Committee it had lost the benefit of Byron's patronage through +the poet's departure from England, and the play was rejected by Mr. +Douglas Kinnaird, the then reader for the theatre, who assigned, +according to Mr. Gillman, "some ludicrous objections to the +metaphysics." Before leaving England, however, Byron rendered a last, +and, as the result proved, a not unimportant service to his brother-poet. He introduced him to Mr. Murray, who, in the following year, +undertook the publication of <i>Christabel</i> – the most successful, +in the sense of the most popular, of all its author's productions in +verse.</p> + +<p>With the coming of spring in the following year that dreary story of +slow self-destruction, into which the narrative of Coleridge's life +from the age of thirty to that of forty-five resolves itself, was +brought to a close. Coleridge had at last perceived that his only hope +of redemption lay in a voluntary submission of his enfeebled will to +the control of others, and he had apparently just enough strength of +volition to form and execute the necessary resolve. He appears, in the +first instance, to have consulted a physician of the name of Adams, +who, on the 9th of April 1816, put himself in communication with Mr. +Gillman of Highgate. "A very learned, but in one respect an +unfortunate gentleman, has," he wrote, "applied to me on a singular +occasion. He has for several years been in the habit of taking large +quantities of opium. For some time past he has been in vain +endeavouring to break himself of it. It is apprehended his friends are +not firm enough, from a dread lest he should suffer by suddenly +leaving it off, though he is conscious of the contrary, and has +proposed to me to submit himself to any regimen, however severe. With +this view he wishes to fix himself in the house of some medical +gentleman who will have the courage to refuse him any laudanum, and +under whose assistance, should he be the worse for it, he may be +relieved." Would such a proposal, inquires the writer, be absolutely +inconsistent with Mr. Gillman's family arrangements? He would not, he +adds, have proposed it "but on account of the great importance of the +character as a literary man. His communicative temper will make his +society very interesting as well as useful." Mr. Gillman's +acquaintance with Dr. Adams was but slight, and he had had no previous +intention of receiving an inmate into his house. But the case very +naturally interested him; he sought an interview with Dr. Adams, and it +was agreed that the latter should drive Coleridge to Highgate the +following evening. At the appointed hour, however, Coleridge presented +himself alone, and, after spending the evening at Mr. Gillman's, left +him, as even in his then condition he left most people who met him for +the first time, completely captivated by the amiability of his manners +and the charm of his conversation. The next day Mr. Gillman received +from him a letter, finally settling the arrangement to place himself +under the doctor's care, and concluding with the following pathetic +passage:</p> + +<p>"And now of myself. My ever wakeful reason and the keenness of my +moral feelings will secure you from all unpleasant circumstances +connected with me save only one, viz. the evasion of a specific +madness. You will never hear anything but truth from me; prior habits +render it out of my power to tell an untruth, but, unless carefully +observed, I dare not promise that I should not, with regard to this +detested poison, be capable of acting one. Not sixty hours have yet +passed without my having taken laudanum, though, for the last week, +comparatively trifling doses. I have full belief that your anxiety +need not be extended beyond the first week, and for the first week, I +shall not, must not, be permitted to leave your house, unless with +you; delicately or indelicately, this must be done, and both the +servants, and the assistant, must receive absolute commands from you. +The stimulus of conversation suspends the terror that haunts my mind; +but, when I am alone, the horrors I have suffered from laudanum, the +degradation, the blighted utility, almost overwhelm me. If (as I feel +for the _first time_ a soothing confidence that it will prove) I +should leave you restored to my moral and bodily health, it is not +myself only that will love and honour you; every friend I have (and, +thank God! in spite of this wretched vice I have many and warm ones, +who were friends of my youth, and have never deserted me) will thank +you with reverence. I have taken no notice of your kind apologies. If +I could not be comfortable in your house and with your family, I +should deserve to be miserable."</p> + +<p>This letter was written on a Saturday, and on the following Monday +Coleridge presented himself at Mr. Gillman's, bringing in his hand the +proof – sheets of <i>Christabel</i>, now printed for the first time. He +had looked, as the letter just quoted shows, with a "soothing +confidence" to leaving his retreat at some future period in a restored +condition of moral and bodily health; and as regards the restoration, +his confidence was in a great measure justified. But the friendly doors +which opened to receive him on this 15th of April 1816, were destined +to close only upon his departing bier. Under the watchful and almost +reverential care of this well-chosen guardian, sixteen years of +comparatively quiet and well-ordered life, of moderate but effective +literary activity, and of gradual though never complete emancipation +from his fatal habit, were reserved to him. He had still, as we shall +see, to undergo certain recurrences of restlessness and renewals of +pecuniary difficulty; his shattered health was but imperfectly and +temporarily repaired; his "shaping spirit of imagination" could not and +did not return; his transcendental broodings became more and more the +"habit of his soul." But henceforth he recovers for us a certain +measure of his long-lost dignity, and a figure which should always +have been "meet for the reverence of the hearth" in the great +household of English literature, but which had far too long and too +deeply sunk below it, becomes once more a worthy and even a venerable +presence. At evening-time it was light.</p> + +<blockquote style="font-variant: small-caps"><strong>Footnotes</strong></blockquote> + +<p><a name="foot_8-1"></a>1. Coleridge made the acquaintance of this gentleman, who became his +enthusiastic disciple, in 1818. His chief interest for us is the fact +that for the next seven years he was Coleridge's correspondent. +Personally, he was a man of little judgment or critical discrimination, +and his sense of the ridiculous may be measured by the following +passage. Speaking of the sweetness of Charles Lamb's smile, he says +that "there is still one man living, a stockbroker, who has that +smile," and adds: "To those who wish to see the only thing left on +earth, <i>if it is still left</i>, of Lamb, his best and most beautiful +remain – his smile, I will indicate its possessor, Mr.— of Throgmorton +Street." How the original "possessor" of this apparently assignable +security would have longed to "feel Mr. Allsop's head"!</p> + + + +<a name="chap9"></a> +<h2>Chapter IX</h2> + +<blockquote>Life at Highgate-Renewed activity-Publications and re-publications – The +<i>Biographia Literaria</i> – The lectures of 1818-Coleridge as a +Shakespearian critic.</blockquote> + +<p style="text-align: center">[1816-1818.]</p> + +<p>The results of the step which Coleridge had just taken became speedily +visible in more ways than one, and the public were among the first to +derive benefit from it. For not only was he stimulated to greater +activity of production, but his now more methodical way of life gave +him time and inclination for that work of arrangement and preparation +for the press which, distasteful to most writers, was no doubt +especially irksome to him, and thus insured the publication of many +pieces which otherwise might never have seen the light. The appearance +of <i>Christabel</i> was, as we have said, received with signal marks of +popular favour, three editions being called for and exhausted in the +same year. In 1816 there appeared also The Statesman's Manual; or the +Bible the best guide to Political Skill and Foresight: a Lay Sermon +addressed to the higher classes of Society, with an Appendix containing +Comments and Essays connected with the Study of the Inspired Writings; +in 1817, another <i>Lay Sermon addressed to the higher and middle +classes on the existing distresses and discontents;</i> and in the same +year followed the most important publication of this period, the +<i>Biographia Literaria</i>.</p> + +<p>In 1817, too, it was that Coleridge at last made his long-meditated +collection and classification of his already published poems, and that +for the first time something approaching to a complete edition of the +poet's works was given to the world. The <i>Sibylline Leaves</i>, as +this reissue was called, had been intended to be preceded by another +volume of verse, and "accordingly on the printer's signatures of every +sheet we find Vol. II, appearing." Too characteristically, however, +the scheme was abandoned, and Volume II. emerged from the press +without any Volume I. to accompany it. The drama of <i>Zapolya</i> +followed in the same year, and proved more successful with the public +than with the critic of Drury Lane. The "general reader" assigned no +"ludicrous objections to its metaphysics;" on the contrary, he took +them on trust, as his generous manner is, and <i>Zapolya</i>, +published thus as a Christmas tale, became so immediately popular +that two thousand copies were sold in six weeks. In the year 1818 +followed the three-volume selection of essays from the <i>Friend</i>, +a reissue to which reference has already been made. With the exception +of <i>Christabel</i>, however, all the publications of these three +years unfortunately proceeded from the house of Gale and Fenner, a +firm which shortly afterwards became bankrupt; and Coleridge thus +lost all or nearly all of the profits of their sale.</p> + +<p>The most important of the new works of this period was, as +has been said, the <i>Biographia Literaria</i>, or, to give it its +other title, <i>Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life and +Opinions</i>. Its interest, however, is wholly critical and +illustrative; as a narrative it would be found extremely disappointing +and probably irritating by the average reader. With the exception of +one or two incidental disclosures, but little biographical information +is to be derived from it which is not equally accessible from sources +independent of the author; and the almost complete want of sequence and +arrangement renders it a very inconvenient work of reference even for +these few biographical details. Its main value is to be found in the +contents of seven chapters, from the fourteenth to the twentieth; but +it is not going too far to say that, in respect of these, it is +literally priceless. No such analysis of the principles of poetry – no +such exact discrimination of what was sound in the modern "return-to-nature" movement from what was false – has ever been accomplished by any +other critic, or with such admirable completeness by this consummate +critic at any other time. Undoubtedly it is not of the light order of +reading; none, or very little, of Coleridge's prose is. The whole of +chapter xv., for instance, in which the specific elements of "poetic +power" are "distinguished from general talent determined to poetic +composition by accidental motives," requires a close and sustained +effort of the attention, but those who bestow it will find it amply re-paid. I know of no dissertation conceived and carried out in terms of +the abstract which in the result so triumphantly justifies itself upon +application to concrete cases, As regards the question of poetic +expression, and the laws by which its true form is determined, +Coleridge's analysis is, it seems to me, final. I cannot, at least, +after the most careful reflection upon it, conceive it as being other +than the absolutely last word on the subject. Reasoning and +illustration are alike so convincing that the reader, like the +contentious student who listened unwillingly to his professor's +demonstration of the first proposition of Euclid, is compelled to +confess that "he has nothing to reply." To the judicious admirer of +Wordsworth, to every one who, while recognising Wordsworth's +inestimable services to English literature as the leader of the +naturalist reaction in poetry, has yet been vaguely conscious of the +defect in his poetic theory, and very keenly conscious of the vices of +his poetic practice, – to all such persons it must be a profound relief +and satisfaction to be guided as unerringly as Coleridge guides them to +the "parting of the ways" of truth and falsity in Wordsworth's +doctrines, and to be enabled to perceive that nothing which has +offended him in that poet's thought and diction has any real connection +with whatever in the poet's principles has commanded his assent. There +is no one who has ever felt uneasy under the blasphemies of the enemy +but must entertain deep gratitude for so complete a discharge as +Coleridge has procured him from the task of defending such lines as</p> + +<p> "And I have travelled far as Hull to see + What clothes he might have left or other property."</p> + +<p>Defend them indeed the ordinary reader probably would not, preferring +even the abandonment of his theory to a task so humiliating. But the +theory has so much of truth and value in it that the critic who has +redeemed it from the discredit of Wordsworth's misapplications of it is +entitled to the thanks of every friend of simplicity, who is at the +same time an enemy of bathos. There is no longer any reason to treat +the deadly commonplaces, amid which we toil through so many pages of +the <i>Excursion</i>, as having any true theoretic affinity with its +but too occasional majestic interludes. The smooth square-cut blocks of +prose which insult the natural beauty of poetic rock and boulder even +in such a scene of naked moorland grandeur as that of <i>Resolution and +Independence</i> are seen and shown to be the mere intruders which we +have all felt them to be. To the Wordsworthian, anxious for a full +justification of the faith that is in him, the whole body of +Coleridge's criticism on his friend's poetry in the <i>Biographia +Literaria</i> may be confidently recommended. The refutation of what is +untenable in Wordsworth's theory, the censure pronounced upon certain +characteristics of his practice, are made all the more impressive by +the tone of cordial admiration which distinguishes every personal +reference to the poet himself, and by the unfailing discrimination with +which the critic singles out the peculiar beauties of his poetry. No +finer selection of finely characteristic Wordsworthian passages could +perhaps have been made than those which Coleridge has quoted in +illustration of his criticisms in the eighteenth and two following +chapters of the <i>Biographia Literaria</i>. For the rest, however, +unless indeed one excepts the four chapters on the Hartleian system and +its relation to the German school of philosophy, the book is rather one +to be dipped into for the peculiar pleasure which an hour in +Coleridge's company must always give to any active intelligence, than +to be systematically studied with a view to perfecting one's conception +of Coleridge's philosophical and critical genius considered in its +totality.</p> + +<p>As to the two lay sermons, the less ambitious of them is decidedly the +more successful. The advice to "the higher and middle classes" on the +existing distresses and discontents contains at least an ingredient of +the practical; its distinctively religious appeals are varied by sound +political and economical arguments; and the enumeration and exposure of +the various artifices by which most orators are accustomed to delude +their hearers is as masterly as only Coleridge could have made it. Who +but he, for instance, could have thrown a piece of subtle observation +into a form in which reason and fancy unite so happily to impress it +on the mind as in the following passage: "The mere appeal to the +auditors, whether the arguments are not such that none but an idiot or +an hireling could resist, is an effective substitute for any argument +at all. For mobs have no memories. They are in nearly the same state +as that of an individual when he makes what is termed a bull. <i>The +passions, like a fused metal, fill up the wide interstices of thought +and supply the defective links; and thus incompatible assertions are +harmonised by the sensation, without the sense of connection</i>." The +other lay sermon, however, the <i>Statesman's Manual</i>, is less +appropriately conceived. Its originating proposition, that the Bible is +"the best guide to political skill and foresight," is undoubtedly open +to dispute, but might nevertheless be capable of plausible defence upon +<i>à priori</i> grounds. Coleridge, however, is not content with this +method of procedure; as, indeed, with so avowedly practical an object +in view he scarcely could be, for a "manual" is essentially a work +intended for the constant consultation of the artificer in the actual +performance of his work, and ought at least to contain illustrations of +the application of its general principles to particular cases. It is in +undertaking to supply these that the essential mysticism of Coleridge's +counsels comes to light. For instance: "I am deceived if you will not be +compelled to admit that the prophet Isaiah revealed the true philosophy +of the French Revolution more than two thousand years before it became a +sad irrevocable truth of history. 'And thou saidst, I shall be a lady +for ever, so that thou didst not lay these things to thy heart neither +didst remember the latter end of it.... Therefore shall evil come upon +thee; thou shalt not know from whence it riseth, etc.'" And to this +ast-quoted sentence Coleridge actually appends the following note: "The +reader will scarcely fail to find in this verse a remembrancer of the +sudden setting in of the frost before the usual time (in a country, +too, where the commencement of its two seasons is in general scarcely +less regular than that of the wet and dry seasons between the tropics) +which caused, and the desolation which accompanied, the flight from +Moscow." One can make no other comment upon this than that if it really + be wisdom which statesmen would do well to lay to heart, the late Dr. +Cumming must have been the most profound instructor in statesmanship +that the world has ever seen. A prime minister of real life, however, +could scarcely be seriously recommended to shape his policy upon a due +consideration of the possible allegoric meaning of a passage in Isaiah, +to say nothing of the obvious objection that this kind of appeal to +<i>Sortes Biblicæ</i> is dangerously liable to be turned against those who +recommend it. On the whole, one must say of this lay sermon that it +justifies the apprehension expressed by the author in its concluding +pages. It does rather "resemble the overflow of an earnest mind than an +orderly and premeditated," in the sense, at any rate, of a well-considered "composition."</p> + +<p>In the month of January 1818 Coleridge once more commenced the delivery +of a course of lectures in London. The scope of this series-fourteen in +number was, as will be seen from the subjoined syllabus, an immensely +comprehensive one. The subject of the first was "the manners, morals, +literature, philosophy, religion, and state of society in general in +European Christendom, from the eighth to the fifteenth century;" and of +the second "the tales and metrical romances common for the most part to +England, Germany, and the north of France; and English songs and ballads +continued to the reign of Charles I." In the third the lecturer proposed +to deal with the poetry of Chaucer and Spenser, of Petrarch, and of +Ariosto, Pulci, and Boiardo. The fourth, fifth, and sixth were to be +devoted to the dramatic works of Shakespeare, and to comprise the +substance of Coleridge's former courses on the same subject, "enlarged +and varied by subsequent study and reflection." In the seventh he was +to treat of the other principal dramatists of the Elizabethan period, +Ben Jonson, Massinger, and Beaumont and Fletcher; in the eighth of the +life and all the works of Cervantes; in the ninth of Rabelais, Swift, +and Sterne, with a dissertation "on the nature and constituents of +genuine humour, and on the distinctions of humorous from the witty, the +fanciful, the droll, the odd, etc." Donne, Dante, and Milton formed the +subject of the tenth; the <i>Arabian Nights Entertainment</i>, and the +<i>romantic</i> use of the supernatural in poetry, that of the eleventh. +The twelfth was to be on "tales of witches and apparitions, etc.," as +distinguished from magic and magicians of Asiatic origin; and the +thirteenth, – "on colour, sound, and form in nature, as connected with +Poesy – the word 'Poesy' being used as the generic or class term +including poetry, music, painting, statuary, and ideal architecture as +its species, the reciprocal relations of poetry and philosophy to each +other, and of both to religion and the moral sense.'" In the fourteenth +and final lecture Coleridge proposed to discuss "the corruptions of the +English language since the reign of Queen Anne, in our style of writing +prose," and to formulate "a few easy rules for the attainment of a +manly, unaffected, and pure language in our genuine mother tongue, +whether for the purposes of writing, oratory, or conversation."</p> + +<p>These lectures, says Mr. Gillman, were from Coleridge's own account +more profitable than any he had before given, though delivered in an +unfavourable situation; a lecture-room in Flower de Luce Court, which, +however, being near the Temple, secured to him the benefit – if benefit +it were – of a considerable number of law students among his auditors. +It was the first time that his devoted guardian had ever heard him in +public, and he reports the significant fact that though Coleridge +lectured from notes, which he had carefully made, "it was obvious that +his audience were more delighted when, putting his notes aside, he +spoke extempore...." He was brilliant, fluent, and rapid; his words +seemed to flow as from a person repeating with grace and energy some +delightful poem. If he sometimes paused, it was not for the want of +words, but that he was seeking their most appropriate or most logical +arrangement.</p> + +<p>An incident related with extreme, though in a great measure +unconscious, drollery by Mr. Gillman in connection with a +lecture delivered at this period is to my mind of more assistance +than many of the accounts of his "lay sermons" in private circles, in +enabling us to comprehend one element of Coleridge's marvellous powers +of discourse. Early one morning at Mr. Gillman's he received two +letters-one to inform him that he was expected that same evening to +deliver a lecture, at the rooms of the London Philosophical Society, +to an audience of some four or five hundred persons; the other +containing a list of the previous lecturers and the lectures delivered +by them during the course of the season. At seven o'clock in the +evening Coleridge and Mr. Gillman went up to town to make some +inquiries respecting this unexpected application; but, on arriving at +the house of the gentleman who had written the letter, they were +informed that he was not at home, but would return at eight o'clock – +the hour fixed for the commencement of the lecture. They then +proceeded to the Society's rooms, where in due time the audience +assembled; and the committee having at last entered and taken their +places on the seats reserved for them, "Mr. President arose from +the centre of the group, and, putting on a 'president's hat,' which +so disfigured him that we could scarcely refrain from laughter, +addressed the company in these words: This evening Mr. Coleridge +will deliver a lecture on 'the Growth of the Individual Mind.'" +Coleridge at first "seemed startled," as well he might, and turning +round to Mr. Gillman whispered: "A pretty stiff subject they have +chosen for me." However, he instantly mounted his standing-place and +began without hesitation, previously requesting his friend to observe +the effect of his lecture on the audience. It was agreed that, should +he appear to fail, Gillman was to "clasp his ancle; but that he was to +continue for an hour if the countenances of his auditors indicated +satisfaction." Coleridge then began his address in these words: "The +lecture I am about to give this evening is purely extempore. Should +you find a nominative case looking out for a verb, or a fatherless +verb for a nominative case, you must excuse it. It is purely extempore, +though I have read and thought much on the subject." At this the +company smiled, which seemed to inspire the lecturer with confidence. +He plunged at once into his lecture – and most brilliant, eloquent, and +logically consecutive it was. The time moved on so swiftly that Mr. +Gillman found, on looking at his watch, that an hour and a half had +passed away, and, therefore, he continues "waiting only a desirable +moment – to use his own playful words – I prepared myself to punctuate +his oration. As previously agreed, I pressed his ancle, and thus gave +him the hint he had requested; when, bowing graciously, and with a +benevolent and smiling countenance, he presently descended. The lecture +was quite new to me, and I believe quite new to himself so far as the +arrangement of his words was concerned. The floating thoughts were +beautifully arranged, and delivered on the spur of the moment. What +accident gave rise to the singular request, that he should deliver +this lecture impromptu, I never learnt; nor did it signify, as it +afforded a happy opportunity to many of witnessing in part the extent +of his reading and the extraordinary strength of his powers."</p> + +<p>It is tantalising to think that no record of this remarkable performance +remains; but, indeed, the same may to some extent be said, and in +various degrees, of nearly all the lectures which Coleridge ever +delivered. With the exception of seven out of the fifteen of 1811, +which were published in 1856 by Mr. Payne Collier from shorthand notes +taken at the time, Coleridge's lectures scarcely exist for us otherwise +than in the form of rough preparatory notes. A few longer pieces, such +as the admirable observations in the second volume of the <i>Literary +Remains</i>, on poetry, on the Greek drama, and on the progress of the +dramatic art in England, are, with the exception above noticed, almost +the only general disquisitions on these subjects which appear to have +reached us in a complete state. Of the remaining contents of the +volume, including the detailed criticisms now textual, now analytic – of +the various plays of Shakespeare, a considerable portion is frankly +fragmentary, pretending, indeed, to no other character than that of +mere marginalia. This, however, does not destroy – I had almost said it +does not even impair – their value. It does but render them all the more +typical productions of a writer, whose greatest services to mankind in +almost every department of human thought and knowledge with which he +concerned himself were much the most often performed in the least +methodical way. In reading through these incomparable notes on +Shakespeare we soon cease to lament, or even to remember, their +unconnected form and often somewhat desultory appearance; if, indeed, +we do not see reason to congratulate ourselves that the annotator, +unfettered by the restraints which the composition of a systematic +treatise would have imposed upon him, is free to range with us at will +over many a flower-strewn field, for which otherwise he could not +perhaps have afforded to quit the main road of his subject. And this +liberty is the more welcome, because Coleridge, <i>primus inter +pares</i> as a critic of any order of literature, is in the domain of +Shakespearian commentary absolute king. The principles of analysis +which he was charged with having borrowed without acknowledgment from +Schlegel, with whose Shakespearian theories he was at the time entirely +unacquainted, were in fact of his own excogitation. He owed nothing in +this matter to any individual German, nor had he anything in common +with German Shakespearianism except its profoundly philosophising +spirit, which, moreover, was in his case directed and restrained by +other qualities, too often wanting in critics of that industrious race; +for he possessed a sense of the ridiculous, a feeling for the poetic, a +tact, a taste, and a judgment, which would have saved many a worthy but +heavy-handed Teutonic professor, who should have been lucky enough to +own these gifts, from exposing himself and his science to the satire of +the light-minded. Very rarely, indeed, do we find Coleridge indulging +<i>plus 'quo</i> his passion for psychological analysis. Deeply as his +criticism penetrates, it is yet loyally recognitive of the opacity of +milestones. Far as he sees into his subject, we never find him fancying +that he sees beyond the point at which the faculty of human vision is +exhausted. His conception of the more complex of Shakespeare's +personages, his theory of their characters, his reading of their +motives, is often subtle, but always sane; his interpretation of the +master's own dealings with them, and of the language which he puts into +their mouths, is often highly imaginative, but it is rarely fanciful. +Take, as an illustration of the first-mentioned merit, the following +acute but eminently sensible estimate of the character of Polonius: – </p> + +<p>"He is the personified memory of wisdom no longer actually possessed. +This admirable character is always misrepresented on the stage. +Shakspeare never intended to exhibit him as a buffoon; for although it +was natural for Hamlet – a young man of fire and genius, detesting +formality and disliking Polonius on political grounds, as imagining +that he had assisted his uncle in his usurpation – should express +himself satirically, yet this must not be taken exactly as the poet's +conception of him. In Polonius a certain induration of character had +arisen from long habits of business; but take his advice to Laertes, +and Ophelia's reverence for his memory, and we shall see that he was +meant to be represented as a statesman somewhat past his faculties – his +recollections of life all full of wisdom, and showing a knowledge of +human nature, while what immediately takes place before him and escapes +from him is indicative of weakness."</p> + +<p>Or this comment on the somewhat faint individualisation of the figure of +Lear:</p> + +<p>"In Lear old age is itself a character-natural imperfections being +increased by life-long habits of receiving a prompt obedience. Any +addition of individualisation would have been unnecessary and painful; +for the relation of others to him, of wondrous fidelity and of frightful +ingratitude, alone sufficiently distinguish him. Thus Lear becomes the +open and ample playroom of nature's passions."</p> + +<p>Or lastly, in illustration of my second point, let us take this note on +the remark of the knight that "since my young lady's going into France the +fool hath much pined away ": – </p> + +<p>"The fool is no comic buffoon – to make the groundlings laugh – no forced +condescension of Shakspeare's genius to the taste of his audience. +Accordingly the poet prepares us for the introduction, which he never does +with any of his common clowns and fools, by bringing him into living +connection with the pathos of the play. He is as wonderful a creation as +Caliban, – his wild babblings and inspired idiocy articulate and gauge the +horrors of the scene."</p> + +<p>The subject is a tempting one to linger over, did not imperative +Exigencies of space compel me to pass on from it. There is much – very +much – more critical matter in the Literary Remains of which it is hard to +forbear quotation; and I may mention in particular the profoundly +suggestive remarks on the nature of the humorous, with their accompanying +analysis of the genius and artistic method of Sterne. But it is, as has +been said, in Shakespearian criticism that Coleridge's unique mastery of +all the tools of the critic is most conspicuous, and it is in the +brilliant, if unmethodised, pages which I have been discussing that we +may most readily find consolation for the too early silencing of his +muse. For these consummate criticisms are essentially and above all the +criticisms of a poet They are such as could not have been achieved by +any man not originally endowed with that divine gift which was fated in +this instance to expend itself within so few years. Nothing, indeed, +could more strikingly illustrate the commanding advantage possessed by +a poet interpreting a poet than is to be found in Coleridge's +occasional sarcastic comments on the <i>banalitès</i> of our national +poet's most prosaic commentator, Warburton – the "thought-swarming, but +idealess Warburton," as he once felicitously styles him. The one man +seems to read his author's text under the clear, diffused, unwavering +radiance emitted from his own poetic imagination; while the criticism +of the other resembles a perpetual scratching of damp matches, which +ash a momentary light into one corner of the dark assage, and then go +out.</p> + + + +<a name="chap10"></a> +<h2>Chapter X</h2> + +<blockquote>Closing years – Temporary renewal of money troubles – The Aids to Reflection + – Growing weakness-Visit to Germany with the Wordsworths – Last illness +and death.</blockquote> + +<p style='text-align: center'>[1818-1834.]</p> + +<p>For the years which now remained to Coleridge, some sixteen in number, +dating from his last appearance as a public lecturer, his life would +seem to have been attended with something, at least, of that sort of +happiness which is enjoyed by the nation of uneventful annals. There is +little to be told of him in the way of literary performance; little +record remains, unfortunately, of the discursively didactic talk in +which, during these years, his intellectual activity found its busiest +exercise; of incident in the ordinary sense of the word there is almost +none. An account of these closing days of his life must resolve itself +almost wholly into a "history of opinion," – an attempt to reanimate for +ourselves that life of perpetual meditation which Coleridge lived, and +to trace, so far as the scanty evidence of his utterances enables us to +do so, the general tenor of his daily thoughts. From one point of view, +of course, this task would be extremely difficult, if not impossible; +from another comparatively easy. It is easy, that is to say, to +investigate Coleridge's speculations, so far as their subject is +concerned, whatever difficulties their obscurity and subtlety may +present to the inquirer; for, as a matter of fact, their subject is +remarkably uniform. Attempts to divide the literary life of a writer +into eras are more often arbitrary and fanciful than not; but the +peculiar circumstances of Coleridge's career did in fact effect the +division for themselves. His life until the age of twenty-six may +fairly be described as in its "poetic period." It was during these +years, and indeed during the last two or three of them, that he +produced all the poetry by which he will be remembered, while he +produced little else of mark or memorability. The twenty years which +follow from 1798 to 1818 may with equal accuracy be styled the +"critical period." It was during these years that he did his best work +as a journalist, and all his work as a public lecturer on aesthetics. +It was during them that he said his say, and even his final say, so far +as any public modes of expression were concerned, on politics and on +art. From 1818 to his death his life was devoted entirely to +metaphysics and theology, and with such close and constant reference to +the latter subject, to which indeed his metaphysics had throughout his +life been ancillary, that it deserves to give the name of the +"theological period" to these closing years.</p> + +<p>Their lack of incident, however, is not entirely as favourable a +circumstance as that uneventfulness of national annals to which I have +compared it; for, though "no news may be good news" in the case of a +nation's history, it is by no means as certainly so in the case of a +man's biography, and, least of all, when the subject is a man whose +inward life of thought and feeling so completely overshadowed his outward +life of action throughout his whole career. There is indeed evidence, +slight in amount, but conclusive in character-plain and painful evidence +enough to show that at least the first four or five years of the period we +have mentioned were not altogether years of resignation and calm; that +they were embittered by recurring agonies of self-reproach, by</p> + +<p> "Sense of past youth, and manhood come in vain, + And genius given, and knowledge won in vain;"</p> + +<p>and by the desolating thought that all which had been "culled in wood-walks wild," and "all which patient toil had reared," were to be</p> + +<p> – "but flowers + Strewn on the corse, and borne upon the bier, + In the same coffin, for the self-same grave!"</p> + +<p>Here and there in the correspondence with Thomas Allsop we obtain a +glimpse into that vast half-darkened arena in which this captive spirit +self-condemned to the lions was struggling its last. To one strange and +hitherto unexplained letter I have already referred. It was written +from Ramsgate in the autumn of 1822, evidently under circumstances of +deep depression. But there is a letter nearly two years earlier in date +addressed to the same correspondent which contains by far the fullest +account of Coleridge's then condition of mind, the state of his +literary engagements and his literary projects, his completed and +uncompleted work. As usual with him it is stress of money matters that +prompts him to write, and he prefaces his request for assistance with +the following portentous catalogue of realised or contemplated schemes. +"Contemplated," indeed, is too modest a word, according to his own +account, to be applied to any one item in the formidable list. Of all +of them, he has, he tells Allsop, "already the written materials and +contents, requiring only to be put together from the loose papers and +commonplace in memorandum books, and needing no other change, whether +of omission, addition, or correction, than the mere act of arranging, +and the opportunity of seeing the whole collectively, bring with them +of course." Heads I. and II. of the list comprise those criticisms on +Shakespeare and the other principal Elizabethan dramatists; on Dante, +Spenser, Milton, Cervantes, Calderon; on Chaucer, Ariosto, Donne, +Rabelais, etc., which formed the staple of the course of lectures +delivered in 1818, and which were published after his death in the +first two of the four volumes of <i>Literary Remains</i> brought out +under the editorship of Mr. H. N. Coleridge. Reserving No. III. for a +moment we find No. IV. to consist of "Letters on the Old and New +Testament, and on the Doctrines and Principles held in common by the +Fathers and Founders of the Reformation, addressed to a Candidate for +Holy Orders, including advice on the plan and subjects of preaching +proper to a minister of the Established Church." The letters never +apparently saw the light of publicity, at any rate, in the epistolary +form, either during the author's lifetime or after his death; and with +regard to II. and III., which did obtain posthumous publication, the +following caution should be borne in mind by the reader. "To the +completion," says Coleridge, "of these four works I have literally +nothing more to do than to transcribe; but, as I before hinted, from so +many scraps and Sibylline leaves, including margins of blank pages that +unfortunately I must be my own scribe, and, not done by myself, they +will be all but lost." As matters turned out he was not his own scribe, +and the difficulty which Mr. Nelson Coleridge experienced in piecing +together the fragmentary materials at his disposal is feelingly +described by him in his preface to the first edition. He added that the +contents of these volumes were drawn from a portion only of the MSS. +entrusted to him, and that the remainder of the collection, which, +under favourable circumstances, he hoped might hereafter see the +light, "was at least of equal value" with what he was then presenting to +the reader. This hope was never realised; and it must be remembered, +therefore, that the published record of Coleridge's achievements as a +critic is, as has already been pointed out, extremely imperfect. [<a href="#foot_10-1">1</a>] +That it is not even more disappointingly so than it is, may well +entitle his nephew and editor to the gratitude of posterity; but where +much has been done, there yet remains much to do ere Coleridge's +consummate analyses of poetic and dramatic works can be presented to +the reader in other than their present shape of a series of detached +brilliancies. The pearls are there, but the string is wanting. Whether +it will be ever supplied, or whether it is possible now to supply it, +one cannot say.</p> + +<p>The third of Coleridge's virtually completed works there is much virtue +in a "virtually"-was a "History of Philosophy considered as a Tendency +of the Human Mind to exhibit the Powers of the Human Reason, to +discover by its own strength the Origin and Laws of Man and the World, +from Pythagoras to Locke and Condillac." This production, however, +considerable as it is, was probably merely ancillary to what he calls +"My GREAT WORK, to the preparation of which more than twenty years of +my life have been devoted, and on which my hopes of extensive and +permanent utility, of fame in the noblest sense of the word, mainly +rest." To this work he goes on to say:</p> + +<p>"All my other writings, unless I except my Poems (and these I can +exclude in part only), are introductory and preparative, while its +result, if the premises be as I with the most tranquil assurance am +convinced they are-incontrovertible, the deductions legitimate, and the +conclusions commensurate, and only commensurate with both [must be], to +effect a revolution in all that has been called Philosophy and +Metaphysics in England and France since the era of commencing +predominance of the mechanical system at the Restoration of our Second +Charles, and with [in] the present fashionable views not only of +religion, morals, and politics, but even of the modern physics and +physiology."</p> + +<p>This, it must be allowed, is a sufficiently "large order," being +Apparently indeed nothing less than an undertaking to demolish the +system of Locke and his successors, and to erect German +Transcendentalism on the ruins. With anything less than this, however +with any less noble object or less faith in their attainments – +Coleridge could not, he declares, have stood acquitted of folly and +abuse of time, talent, and learning, on a labour of three – fourths of +his intellectual life. Somewhat more than a volume of this <i>magnum +opus</i> had been dictated by him to his "friend and enlightened pupil, +Mr. Green, so as to exist fit for the press;" and more than as much +again had been done, but he had been compelled to break off the weekly +meetings with his pupil from the necessity of writing on subjects of +the passing day. Then comes a reference, the last we meet with, to the +real "great work," as the unphilosophic world has always considered and +will always consider it. On this subject he says:</p> + +<p>"Of my poetic works I would fain finish the <i>Christabel</i>, Alas! +for the proud time when I planned, when I had present to my mind the +materials as well as the scheme of the Hymns entitled Spirit, Sun, +Earth, Air, Water, Fire, and Man; and the Epic Poem on what appears to +me the only fit subject remaining for an Epic Poem – Jerusalem besieged +and destroyed by Titus."</p> + +<p>And then there follows this most pathetic passage, necessary, in spite +of its length, to be transcribed entire, both on account of the value +of its biographic details – its information on the subject of the useless +worldly affairs, etc. – and because of the singularly penetrating light +which it throws upon the mental and moral nature of the man: – </p> + +<p>"I have only by fits and starts ever prayed – I have not prevailed upon +myself to pray to God in sincerity and entireness for the fortitude +that might enable me to resign myself to the abandonment of all my +life's best hopes, to say boldly to myself, 'Gifted with powers +confessedly above mediocrity, aided by an education of which no less +from almost unexampled hardships and sufferings than from manifold and +peculiar advantages I have never yet found a parallel, I have devoted +myself to a life of unintermitted reading, thinking, meditating, and +observing, I have not only sacrificed all worldly prospects of wealth +and advancement, but have in my inmost soul stood aloof from temporary +reputation. In consequence of these toils and this self-dedication I +possess a calm and clear consciousness that in many and most important +departments of truth and beauty I have outstrode my contemporaries, +those at least of highest name, that the number of my. printed works +bear witness that I have not been idle, and the seldom acknowledged but +strictly <i>proveable</i> effects of my labours appropriated to the +welfare of my age in the <i>Morning Post</i> before the peace of +Amiens, in the <i>Courier</i> afterwards, and in the serious and +various subjects of my lectures... (add to which the unlimited freedom +of my communications to colloquial life) may surely be allowed as +evidence that I have not been useless to my generation. But, from +circumstances, the main portion of my harvest is still on the ground, +ripe indeed and only waiting, a few for the sickle, but a large part +only for the <i>sheaving</i> and carting and housing-but from all this +I must turn away and let them rot as they lie, and be as though they +never had been; for I must go and gather black berries and earth-nuts, +or pick mushrooms and gild oak-apples for the palate and fancies of +chance customers. I must abrogate the name of philosopher and poet, and +scribble as fast as I can and with as little thought as I can for +<i>Blackwood's Magazine</i>, or as I have been employed for the last +days in writing MS. sermons for lazy clergymen who stipulate that the +composition must be more than respectable.'... This" [<i>i.e.</i> to +say this to myself] "I have not yet had courage to do. My soul sickens +and my heart sinks, and thus oscillating between both" [forms of +activity – the production of permanent and of ephemeral work] "I do +neither – neither as it ought to be done to any profitable end."</p> + +<p>And his proposal for extricating himself from this distressing position +is that "those who think respectfully and hope highly of my power and +attainments should guarantee me a yearly sum for three or four years, +adequate to my actual support, with such comforts and decencies of +appearance as my health and habit have made necessaries, so that my +mind may be unanxious as far as the present time is concerned." Thus +provided for he would undertake to devote two-thirds of his time to +some one work of those above mentioned that is to say, of the first +four – and confine it exclusively to it till finished, while the +remaining third of his time he would go on maturing and completing his +"great work," and "(for, if but easy in my mind, I have no doubt either +of the reawakening power or of the kindling inclination) my +<i>Christabel</i> and what else the happier hour may inspire." Mr. +Green, he goes on to say, had promised to contribute £30 to £40 yearly, +another pupil, "the son of one of my dearest old friends, £50," and £10 +or £20 could, he thought, be relied on from another. The whole amount +of the required annuity would be about £200, to be repaid of course +should disposal or sale of his works produce, or as far as they should +produce, the means. But "am I entitled," he asks uneasily, "have I a +<i>right</i> to do this I Can I do it without moral degradation? And +lastly, can it be done without loss of character in the eyes of my +acquaintances and of my friends' acquaintances?"</p> + +<p>I cannot take upon myself to answer these painful questions. The reply +to be given to them must depend upon the judgment which each individual +student of this remarkable but unhappy career may pass upon it as a +whole; and, while it would be too much to expect that that judgment +should be entirely favourable, one may at least believe that a fair +allowance for those inveterate weaknesses of physical constitution +which so largely aggravated, if they did not wholly generate, the fatal +infirmities of Coleridge's moral nature, must materially mitigate the +harshness of its terms.</p> + +<p>The story of Coleridge's closing years is soon told. It is mainly a +record of days spent in meditation and discourse, in which character it +will be treated of more fully in a subsequent chapter. His literary +productions during the last fourteen years of his life were few in +number, and but one of them of any great importance. In 1821 he had +offered himself as an occasional contributor to <i>Blackwood's +Magazine</i>, but a series of papers promised by him to that periodical +were uncompleted, and his only two contributions (in October 1821 and +January 1822) are of no particular note. In May 1825 he read a paper on +the <i>Prometheus</i> of 'schylus before the Royal Society of Literature; +but "the series of disquisitions respecting the Egyptian in connection +with the sacerdotal theology and in contrast with the mysteries of +ancient Greece," to which this essay had been announced as preparatory, +never made their appearance. In the same year, however, he published +one of the best known of his prose works, his <i>Aids to Reflection</i>.</p> + +<p>Of the success of this latest of Coleridge's more important +contributions to literature there can be no doubt. New editions of it +seem to have been demanded at regular intervals for some twenty years +after its first production, and it appears to have had during the same +period a relatively equal reissue in the United States. The Rev. Dr. +James Marsh, an American divine of some ability and reputation, +composed a preliminary essay (now prefixed to the fifth English +edition), in which he elaborately set forth the peculiar merits of the +work, and undertook to initiate the reader in the fittest and most +profitable method of making use of it. In these remarks the reverend +essayist insists more strongly on the spiritually edifying quality of +the <i>Aids</i> than on their literary merits, and, for my own part, I +must certainly consider him right in doing so. As a religious manual it +is easy to understand how this volume of Coleridge's should have +obtained many and earnest readers. What religious manual, which shows +traces of spiritual insight, or even merely of pious yearnings after +higher and holier than earthly things, has ever failed to win such +readers among the weary and heavy-laden of the world? And that +Coleridge, a writer of the most penetrating glance into divine +mysteries, and writing always from a soul all tremulous, as it were, +with religious sensibility, should have obtained such readers in +abundance is not surprising. But to a critic and literary biographer I +cannot think that his success in this respect has much to say. For my +own part, at any rate, I find considerable difficulty in tracing it to +any distinctively literary origin. There seems to me to be less charm +of thought, less beauty of style, less even of Coleridge's seldom-failing force of effective statement, in the <i>Aids to Reflection</i> +than in almost any of his writings. Even the volume of some dozen short +chapters on the Constitution of the Church and State, published in +1830, as an "aid towards a right judgment in the late Catholic Kelief +Bill," appears to me to yield a more characteristic flavour of the +author's style, and to exhibit far more of his distinction of literary +workmanship than the earlier and more celebrated work.</p> + +<p>Among the acquaintances made by Coleridge after his retirement to Mr. +Gillman's was one destined to be of some importance to the history of +his philosophical work. It was that of a gentleman whose name has +already been mentioned in this chapter, Mr. Joseph Henry Green, +afterwards a distinguished surgeon and Fellow of the Royal Society, who +in his early years had developed a strong taste for metaphysical +speculation, going even so far as to devote one of his hard-earned +periods of professional holiday to a visit to Germany for the sake of +studying philosophy in that home of abstract thought. To him Coleridge +was introduced by his old Roman acquaintance, Ludwig Tieck, on one of +the latter's visits to England, and he became, as the extract above +quoted from Coleridge's correspondence shows, his enthusiastic disciple +and indefatigable fellow-worker. In the pursuit of their common studies +and in those weekly reunions of admiring friends which Coleridge, while +his health permitted it, was in the habit of holding, we may believe +that a considerable portion of these closing years of his life was +passed under happier conditions than he had been long accustomed to. It +is pleasant to read of him among his birds and flowers, and surrounded +by the ever-watchful tendance of the affectionate Gillmans, tranquil in +mind at any rate, if not at ease from his bodily ailments, and +enjoying, as far as enjoyment was possible to him, the peaceful close +of a stormy and unsettled day. For the years 1825-30, moreover, his +pecuniary circumstances were improved to the extent of £105 per annum, +obtained for him at the instance of the Royal Society of Literature, +and held by him till the death of George IV.</p> + +<p>Two incidents of his later years are, however, worthy of more special +mention – a tour up the Rhine, which he took in 1828, in company with +Wordsworth and his daughter; and, some years earlier, a meeting with +John Keats. "A loose, slack, not well dressed youth," it is recorded in +the <i>Table Talk,</i> published after his death by his nephew, "met +Mr.—" (it was Mr. Green, of whom more hereafter) "and myself in a +lane near Highgate. Green knew him and spoke. It was Keats. He was +introduced to me, and stayed a minute or so. After he had left us a +little way, he came back and said, 'Let me carry away the memory, +Coleridge, of having pressed your hand.' 'There is death in that hand,' +I said to Green when Keats was gone; yet this was, I believe, before +the consumption showed itself distinctly."</p> + +<p>His own health, however, had been steadily declining in these latter +years, and the German tour with the Wordsworths must, I should imagine, +have been the last expedition involving any considerable exercise of +the physical powers which he was able to take. Within a year or so +afterwards his condition seems to have grown sensibly worse. In +November 1831 he writes that for eighteen months past his life had been +"one chain of severe sicknesses, brief and imperfect convalescences, +and capricious relapses." Henceforth he was almost entirely confined to +the sick-room. His faculties, however, still remained clear and +unclouded. The entries in the <i>Table Talk</i> do not materially +dimmish in frequency. Their tone of colloquy undergoes no perceptible +variation; they continue to be as stimulating and delightful reading as +ever. Not till 11th July 1834 do we find any change; but here at last +we meet the shadow, deemed longer than it was in reality, of the +approaching end. "I am dying," said Coleridge, "but without expectation +of a speedy release. Is it not strange that, very recently, bygone +images and scenes of early life have stolen into my mind like breezes +blown from the spice-islands of Youth and Hope – those twin realities of +the phantom world! I do not add Love, for what is Love but Youth and +Hope embracing, and, so seen, as <i>one</i>.... Hooker wished to live +to finish his <i>Ecclesiastical Polity</i> – so I own I wish life and +strength had been spared to me to complete my <i>Philosophy.</i> For, +as God hears me, the originating, continuing, and sustaining wish and +design in my heart were to exalt the glory of His name; and, which is +the same thing in other words, to promote the improvement of mankind. +But <i>visum aliter Deo,</i> and His will be done."</p> + +<p>The end was nearer than he thought. It was on the 11th of July, as has +been said, that he uttered these last words of gentle and pious +resignation. On that day fortnight he died. Midway, however, in this +intervening period, he knew that the "speedy release" which he had not +ventured to expect was close at hand. The death, when it came, was in +some sort emblematic of the life. Sufferings severe and constant, till +within thirty-six hours of the end: at the last peace. On the 25th of +July 1834 this sorely-tried, long-labouring, fate-marred and self-marred life passed tranquilly away. The pitiful words of Kent over his +dead master rise irrepressibly to the lips – </p> + +<p> "O let him pass: he hates him + Who would upon the rack of this tough world + Stretch him out longer."</p> + +<p>There might have been something to be said, though not by Kent, of the +weaknesses of Lear himself; but at such a moment compassion both for +the king and for the poet may well impose silence upon censure.</p> + +<blockquote style="font-variant: small-caps"><strong>Footnotes</strong></blockquote> + +<p><a name="foot_10-1"></a>1. How imperfect, a comparison between estimated and actual bulk will +show. No. I. was, according to Coleridge's reckoning, to form three +volumes of 500 pages each. In the Literary Remains it fills less than +half of four volumes of little more than 400 pages each.</p> + + + +<a name="chap11"></a> +<h2>Chapter XI</h2> + +<blockquote>Coleridge's metaphysics and theology – The <i>Spiritual Philosophy</i> +of Mr. Green.</blockquote> + +<p>In spite of all the struggles, the resolutions, and the entreaties +which displayed themselves so distressingly in the letter to Mr. +Allsop, quoted in the last chapter, it is doubtful whether Coleridge's +"great work" made much additional progress during the last dozen years +of his life. The weekly meeting with Mr. Green seems, according to the +latter's biographer, to have been resumed. Mr. Simon tells us that he +continued year after year to sit at the feet of his Gamaliel, getting +more and more insight into his opinions, until, in 1834, two events +occurred which determined the remaining course of Mr. Green's life. One +of these events, it is needless to say, was Coleridge's death; the +other was the death of his disciple's father, with the result of +leaving Mr. Green possessed of such ample means as to render him +independent of his profession. The language of Coleridge's will, +together, no doubt, with verbal communications which had passed, +imposed on Mr. Green what he accepted as an obligation to devote so far +as necessary the whole remaining strength and earnestness of his life +to the one task of systematising, developing, and establishing the +doctrines of the Coleridgian philosophy. Accordingly, in 1836, two +years after his master's death, he retired from medical practice, and +thenceforward, until his own death nearly thirty years afterwards, he +applied himself unceasingly to what was in a twofold sense a labour of +love.</p> + +<p>We are not, it seems from his biographer's account, to suppose that Mr. +Green's task was in any material degree lightened for him by his previous +collaboration with Coleridge. The latter had, as we have seen, declared +in his letter to Allsop that "more than a volume" of the great work had +been dictated by him to Mr. Green, so as to exist in a condition fit for +the press: but this, according to Mr. Simon, was not the case; and the +probability is therefore that "more than a volume" meant written material +equal in amount to more than a volume – of course, an entirely different +thing. Mr. Simon, at any rate, assures us that no available written +material existed for setting comprehensively before the public, in +Coleridge's own language, and in an argued form, the philosophical system +with which he wished his name to be identified. Instead of it there were +fragments – for the most part mutually inadaptable fragments, and +beginnings, and studies of special subjects, and numberless notes on the +margins and fly-leaves of books.</p> + +<p>With this equipment, such as it was, Mr. Green set to work to methodise +the Coleridgian doctrines, and to construct from them nothing less than +such a system of philosophy as should "virtually include the law and +explanation of all being, conscious and unconscious, and of all +correlativity and duty, and be applicable directly or by deduction to +whatsoever the human mind can contemplate – sensuous or supersensuous – of +experience, purpose, or imagination." Born under post-diluvian +conditions, Mr. Green was of course unable to accomplish his self-proposed enterprise, but he must be allowed to have attacked his task +with remarkable energy. "Theology, ethics, politics and political +history, ethnology, language, aesthetics, psychology, physics, and the +allied sciences, biology, logic, mathematics, pathology, all these +subjects," declares his biographer, "were thoughtfully studied by him, in +at least their basial principles and metaphysics, and most were +elaborately written of, as though for the divisions of some vast +cyclop'dic work." At an early period of his labours he thought it +convenient to increase his knowledge of Greek; he began to study Hebrew +when more than sixty years old, and still later in life he took up +Sanscrit. It was not until he was approaching his seventieth year and +found his health beginning to fail him that Mr. Green seems to have felt +that his design, in its more ambitious scope, must be abandoned, and +that, in the impossibility of applying the Coleridgian system of +philosophy to all human knowledge, it was his imperative duty under his +literary trust to work out that particular application of it which its +author had most at heart. Already, in an unpublished work which he had +made it the first care of his trusteeship to compose, he had, though but +roughly and imperfectly, as he considered, exhibited the relation of his +master's doctrines to revealed religion, and it had now become time to +supersede this unpublished compendium, the <i>Religio Laici</i>, as he +had styled it, by a fuller elaboration of the great Coleridgian position, +that "Christianity, rightly understood, is identical with the highest +philosophy, and that, apart from all question of historical evidence, the +essential doctrines of Christianity are necessary and eternal truths of +reason – truths which man, by the vouchsafed light of Nature and without +aid from documents or tradition, may always and anywhere discover for +himself." To this work accordingly Mr. Green devoted the few remaining +years of his life, and, dying in 1863 at the age of seventy-two, left +behind him in MS. the work entitled <i>Spiritual Philosophy: founded on +the teaching of the late Samuel Taylor Coleridge,</i> which was published +two years later, together with the memoir of the author, from which I +have quoted, by Mr. John Simon. It consists of two volumes, the first of +which is devoted to the exposition of the general principles of +Coleridge's philosophy, while the second is entirely theological, and +aims at indicating on principles for which the first volume has +contended, the essential doctrines of Christianity.</p> + +<p>The earlier chapters of this volume Mr. Green devotes to an exposition +(if indeed the word can be applied to what is really a catalogue of the +results of a transcendental intuition) of the essential difference +between the reason and the understanding – a distinction which Coleridge +has himself elsewhere described as preeminently the <i>gradus ad +philosophiam,</i> and might well have called its <i>pons asinorum.</i> In +the second part of his first volume Mr. Green applies himself to the +establishment of a position which, fundamental as it must be accounted in +all philosophical speculations of this school, is absolutely vital to the +theology which Coleridge sought to erect upon a metaphysical basis. This +position is that the human will is to be regarded as the one ultimate +fact of self-consciousness. So long as man confines himself to the +contemplation of his percipient and reflective self alone – so long as he +attends only to those modes of consciousness which are produced in him by +the impressions of the senses and the operations of thought, he can never +hope to escape from the famous <i>reductio ad inscibile</i> of Hume. He +can never affirm anything more than the existence of those modes of +consciousness, or assert, at least as a direct deliverance of intuition, +that his conscious self <i>is</i> anything apart from the perceptions and +concepts to which he is attending. But when he turns from his perceiving +and thinking to his willing self he becomes for the first time aware of +something deeper than the mere objective presentations of consciousness; +he obtains a direct intuition of an originant, causative, and independent +self-existence. He will have attained in short to the knowledge of a +noumenon, and of the only knowable noumenon. The barrier, elsewhere +insuperable between the subject and object, is broken down; that which +<i>knows</i> becomes identified with that which <i>is;</i> and in the +consciousness of will the consciousness also of a self, as something +independent of and superior to its own modifications, is not so much +affirmed as acquired. The essence, in short, of the Coleridgian ontology +consists in the alteration of a single though a very important word in +the well-known Cartesian formula. <i>Cogito ergo sum</i> had been shown +by Hume to involve an illicit process of reasoning. Descartes, according +to the Scottish sceptic, had no right to have said more than <i>Cogito +ergo cogitationes sunt.</i> But substitute willing for thinking, convert +the formula into <i>Volo ergo sum</i>, and it becomes irrefragable.</p> + +<p>So far as I can perceive, it would have been sufficient for Mr. Green's +subsequent argument to have thus established the position of the will as +the ultimate fact of consciousness, but he goes on to assert that he has +thus secured the immovable ground of a philosophy of Realism. For since +man, "in affirming his Personality by the verb substantive I am, asserts, +nay, acquires, the knowledge of his own Substance as a Spiritual being, +and thereby knows what substance truly and properly is – so he +contemplates the outward, persons or things, as subjects partaking of +reality by virtue of the same substance of which he is conscious in his +own person." So far, however, from this being a philosophy of Realism, it +is in effect, if not indeed in actual terms, a philosophy of Idealism. I, +at least, am unable to see how any Idealist, from Berkeley downwards, +could ask for a better definition of his theory of the external world +than that it "partakes of reality by virtue of the same substance of +which he is conscious in his own person."</p> + +<p>But it is, of course, with the second volume of Mr. Green's work that one +is chiefly concerned. Had Coleridge been a mere Transcendentalist for +Transcendentalism's sake, had there been no connection between his +philosophy of Being and his religious creed, it might be a question +whether even the highly condensed and necessarily imperfect sketch which +has here been given of it would not have been superfluous and out of +place. But Coleridge was a Theosophist first, and a philosopher +afterwards; it was mainly as an organon of religion that he valued his +philosophy, and it was to the development and perfection of it, <i>as +such organon,</i> that he may be said to have devoted, so far as it could +be redeemed from its enthralment to lower necessities, the whole of the +latter half of his career. No account of his life, therefore, could be +complete without at least some brief glance at the details of this +notable attempt to lead the world to true religion by the road of the +Transcendental philosophy. It is difficult, of course, for those who have +been trained in a wholly differet school of thought to do justice to +processes of reasoning carried on, as they cannot but hold, in terms of +the inconceivable; it is still more difficult to be sure that you have +done justice to it after all has been said; and I think that no candid +student of the Coleridgian philosophico-theology (not being a professed +disciple of it, and therefore bound, at any rate, to feign familiarity +with incomprehensibilities) will deny that he is often compelled, to +formulate its positions and recite its processes in somewhat of the same +modest and confiding spirit as animates those youthful geometricians who +leacn their Euclid by heart. With this proviso I will, as briefly as may +be, trace the course of the dialectic by which Mr. Green seeks to make +the Coleridgian metaphysics demonstrative of the truth of Christianity.</p> + +<p>Having shown that the Will is the true and the only tenable base of +Philosophic Realism, the writer next proceeds to explain the growth of +the Soul, from its rudimental strivings in its fallen condition to the +development of its spiritual capabilities and to trace its ascent to the +conception of the Idea of God. The argument – if we may apply so definite +a name to a process which is continually forced to appeal to something +that may perhaps be higher, but is certainly <i>other</i> than the +ratiocinative faculty – is founded partly on moral and partly on +intellectual considerations. By an analysis of the moral phenomena +associated with the action of the human will, and, in particular, of the +conflict which arises between "the tendency of all Will to make itself +absolute," and the consciousness that, under the conditions of man's +fallen state, nothing but misery could result both to the individual and +the race from the fulfilment of this tendency, – Mr. Green shows how the +Soul, or the Reason, or the Speculative Intellect (for he seems to use +all three expressions indiscriminately) is morally prepared for the +reception of the truth which his Understanding alone could never have +compassed, – the Idea of God. This is in effect neither more nor less than +a restatement of that time-honoured argument for the existence of some +Being of perfect holiness which has always weighed so much with men of +high spirituality as to blind them to the fact of its actually enhancing +the intellectual difficulties of the situation. Man possesses a Will +which longs to fulfil itself; but it is coupled with a nature which +constantly impels him to those gratifications of will which tend not to +self-preservation and progress, but to their contraries. Surely, then, on +the strength of the mere law of life, which prevails everywhere, here +must be some higher archetypal Will, to which human wills, or rather +certain selected examples of them, may more and more conform themselves, +and in which the union of unlimited efficiency in operation with +unqualified purity of aim has been once for all effected. Or to put it +yet another way: The life of the virtuous man is a life auxiliary to the +preservation and progress of the race; but his will is under restraint. +The will of the vicious man energises freely enough, but his life is +hostile to the preservation and progress of the race. Now the natural and +essential <i>nisus</i> of all Will is towards absolute freedom. But +nothing in life has a natural and essential <i>nisus</i> towards that +which tends to its deterioration and extinction. Therefore, there must be +some ultimate means of reconciling absolute freedom of the Will with +perfectly salutary conditions of its exercise. And since Mr. Green, like +his master and all other Platonists, is incapable of stopping here, and +contenting himself with assuming the existence of a "stream of tendency" +which will gradually bring the human will into the required conditions, +he here makes the inevitable Platonic jump, and proceeds to conclude that +there must be a self-existent ideal Will in which absolute freedom and +power concur with perfect purity and holiness.</p> + +<p>So much for the moral part of Mr. Green's proof, which so far fails, it +will be observed, to carry us much beyond the Pantheistic position. It +has, that is to say, to be proved that the "power not ourselves," which +has been called Will, originates in some source to which we should be +rationally justified in giving the name of "God;" and, singular as such a +thing may seem, it is impossible at any rate for the logic of the +understanding to regard Mr. Green's argument on this point as otherwise +than hopelessly circular. The half-dozen pages or so which he devotes to +the refutation of the Pantheistic view reduce themselves to the following +simple <i>petitio principii:</i> the power is first assumed to be a Will; +it is next affirmed with perfect truth that the very notion of Will would +escape us except under the condition of Personality; and from this the +existence of a personal God as the source of the power in question +deduced. And the same vice underlies the further argument by which Mr. +Green meets the familiar objection to the personality of the Absolute as +involving contradictory conceptions. An infinite Person, he argues, is no +contradiction in terms, unless "finition or limitation" be regarded as +identical with "negation" (which, when applied to a hypothetical +Infinite, one would surely think it is); and an Absolute Will is not the +less absolute from being self-determined <i>ab intra.</i> For how, he +asks, can any Will which is causative of reality be conceived as a Will +except by conceiving it as <i>se finiens,</i> predetermining itself to +the specific processes required by the act of causation? How, indeed? But +the answer of a Pantheist would of course be that the very impossibility +of conceiving of Will except as <i>se finiens</i> is his very ground for +rejecting the notion of a volitional (in the sense of a personal) origin +of the cosmos.</p> + +<p>However, it is beyond my purposes to enter into any detailed criticism of +Mr. Green's position, more especially as I have not yet reached the +central and capital point of his spiritual philosophy – the construction +of the Christian theology on the basis of the Coleridgian metaphysics. +Having deduced the Idea of God from man's consciousness of an individual +Will perpetually affirming itself, Mr. Green proceeds to evolve the Idea +of the Trinity, by (as he considers it) an equally necessary process from +two of the invariable accompaniments of the above-mentioned introspective +act. "For as in our consciousness," he truly says, "we are under the +necessity of distinguishing the relation of 'myself,' now as the +<i>subject</i> thinking and now as the <i>object</i> contemplated in the +manifold of thought, so we might express the relations in the Divine +instance as <i>Deus Subjectivus</i> and <i>Deus Objectimis,</i> – that is, +the Absolute Subjectivity or Supreme Will, uttering itself as and +contemplating itself in the Absolute Objectivity or plenitude of Being +eternally and causatively realised in his Personality." Whence it follows +(so runs or seems to run the argument) that the Idea of God the Father as +necessarily involves the Idea of God the Son as the "I" who, as the +thinking subject, contemplate myself, implies the contemplated "Me" as +the object thought of. Again, the man who reflects on the fact of his +consciousness, "which discloses to him the unavoidable opposition of +subject and object in the self of which he is conscious, cannot fail to +see that the conscious mind requires not only the distinction in order to +the act of reflection in itself, but the continual sense of the relative +nature of the distinction and of the essential oneness of the mind +itself." Whence it follows (so runs or seems to run the argument) that +the Idea of the first two Persons of the Trinity as necessarily involves +the Idea of the Third Person, as the contemplation of the "Me" by the "I" +implies the perpetual consciousness that the contemplator and the +contemplated – the "I" and the "Me" – are one. In this manner is the Idea +of the Trinity shown to be involved in the Idea of God, and to arise out +of it by an implication as necessary as that which connects together the +three phases of consciousness attendant upon every self-contemplative act +of the individual mind. [<a href="#foot_11-1">1</a>]</p> + +<p>It may readily be imagined that after the Speculative Reason has been +made to perform such feats as these the remainder of the work proposed to +it could present no serious difficulty. And in the half-dozen chapters +which follow it is made to evolve in succession the doctrine of the +Incarnation, the Advent, and the Atonement of Christ, and to explain the +mysteries of the fall of man and of original sin. Considered in the +aspect in which Coleridge himself would have preferred to regard his +pupil's work, namely as a systematic attempt to lead the minds of men to +Christianity by an intellectual route, no more hopeless enterprise +perhaps could have been conceived than that embodied in these volumes. It +is like offering a traveller a guide-book written in hieroglyphics. Upon +the most liberal computation it is probable that not one-fourth part of +educated mankind are capable of so much as comprehending the philosophic +doctrine upon which Coleridge seeks to base Christianity, and it is +doubtful whether any but a still smaller fraction of these would admit +that the foundation was capable of supporting the superstructure. That +the writings of the pupil, like the teachings of the master whom he +interprets, may serve the cause of religion in another than an +intellectual way is possible enough. Not a few of the functions assigned +to the Speculative Reason will strike many of us as moral and spiritual +rather than intellectual in their character, and the appeal to them is in +fact an appeal to man to chasten the lower passions of his nature, and to +discipline his unruly will. Exhortations of that kind are religious all +the world of philosophy over, and will succeed in proportion to the moral +fervour and oratorical power which distinguish them. But if the benefits +of Coleridge's theological teachings are to be reduced to this, it would +of course have been much better to have dissociated them altogether from +the exceedingly abstruse metaphysic to which they have been wedded.</p> + +<blockquote style="font-variant: small-caps"><strong>Footnotes</strong></blockquote> + +<p><a name="foot_11-1"></a>1. Were it not hazardous to treat processes of the Speculative Reason +as we deal with the vulgar dialectic of the Understanding, one would be +disposed to reply that if the above argument proves the existence of +three persons in the Godhead, it must equally prove the existence of +three persons in every man who reflects upon his conscious self. That +the Divine Mind, when engaged in the act of self-contemplation, must be +conceived under three relations is doubtless as true as that the human +mind, when so engaged, must be so conceived; but that these three +relations are so many objective realities is what Mr. Green asserts +indeed a few pages farther on, but what he nowhere attempts to prove.</p> + + + +<a name="chap12"></a> +<h2>Chapter XII</h2> + +<blockquote>Coleridge's position in his later years – His discourse – His influence +on contemporary thought – Final review of his intellectual work.</blockquote> + +<p>The critic who would endeavour to appreciate the position which +Coleridge fills in the history of literature and thought for the first +half of the nineteenth century must, if he possesses ordinary candour +and courage, begin, I think, with a confession. He must confess an +inability to comprehend the precise manner in which that position was +attained, and the precise grounds on which it was recognised. For vast +as were Coleridge's powers of thought and expression, and splendid, if +incomplete, as is the record which they have left behind them in his +works, they were never directed to purposes of instruction or +persuasion in anything like that systematic and concentrated manner +which is necessary to him who would found a school. Coleridge's +writings on philosophical and theological subjects were essentially +discursive, fragmentary, incomplete. Even when he professes an +intention of exhausting his subject and affects a logical arrangement, +it is not long before he forgets the design and departs from the order. +His disquisitions are in no sense connected treatises on the subjects +to which they relate. Brilliant <i>apercus,</i> gnomic sayings, flights +of fervid eloquence, infinitely suggestive reflections – of these there +is enough and to spare; but these, though an ample equipment for the +critic, are not sufficient for the constructive philosopher. Nothing, +it must be frankly said, in Coleridge's philosophical and theological +writings – nothing, that is to say, which appeals in them to the mere +intelligence – suffices to explain, at least to the appreciation of +posterity, the fact that he was surrounded during these closing years +of his life by an eager crowd of real or supposed disciples, including +two, at any rate, of the most remarkable personalities of the time. And +if nothing in Coleridge's writings serves to account for it, so neither +does anything traceable or tangible in the mere matter of his +conversations. This last point, however, is one which must be for the +present reserved. I wish for the moment to confine myself to the fact +of Coleridge's position during his later life at Highgate. To this we +have, as we all know, an extremely eminent witness, and one from whose +evidence most people, one may suppose, are by this time able to make +their own deductions in all matters relating to the persons with whom +he was brought into contact. Carlyle on Charles Lamb, few as the sour +sentences are, must always warn us to be careful how we follow Carlyle +"on" anybody whomsoever. But there is no evidence of any ill feeling on +Carlyle's part towards Coleridge – nothing but a humorous, kindly-contemptuous compassion for his weaknesses and eccentricities; and the +famous description in the <i>Life of Sterling</i> may be taken +therefore as a fairly accurate account of the man and the circumstances +to which it refers: – </p> + +<p>"Coleridge sat on the brow of Highgate Hill in those years, looking +down on London and its smoke tumult like a sage escaped from the +inanity of life's battle, attracting towards him the thoughts of +innumerable brave souls still engaged there. His express +contributions to poetry, philosophy, or any specific province of human +literature or enlightenment had been small and sadly intermittent; but +he had, especially among young inquiring men, a higher than literary, a +kind of prophetic or magician character. He was thought to hold – he +alone in England – the key of German and other Transcendentalisms; knew +the sublime secret of believing by the 'reason' what the +'understanding' had been obliged to fling out as incredible; and could +still, after Hume and Voltaire had done their best and worst with him, +profess himself an orthodox Christian, and say and print to the Church +of England, with its singular old rubrics and surplices at +Allhallowtide, <i>Esto perpetua.</i> A sublime man; who alone in those +dark days had saved his crown of spiritual manhood, escaping from the +black materialisms and revolutionary deluges with 'God, Freedom, +Immortality,' still his; a king of men. The practical intellects of the +world did not much heed him, or carelessly reckoned him a metaphysical +dreamer; but to the rising spirits of the young generation he had this +dusky sublime character, and sat there as a kind of Magus, girt in +mystery and enigma; his Dodona oak-grove (Mr. Gillman's house at +Highgate) whispering strange things, uncertain whether oracles or +jargon."</p> + +<p>The above quotation would suffice for my immediate purpose, +but it is impossible to deny oneself or one's readers the pleasure of a +refreshed recollection of the noble landscape-scene and the masterly +portrait that follow:</p> + +<p>"The Gillmans did not encourage much company or excitation of any sort +round their sage; nevertheless, access to him, if a youth did reverently +wish it, was not difficult. He would stroll about the pleasant garden +with you, sit in the pleasant rooms of the place – perhaps take you to +his own peculiar room, high up, with a rearward view, which was the +chief view of all. A really charming outlook in fine weather. Close at +hand wide sweeps of flowing leafy gardens, their few houses mostly +hidden, the very chimney-pots veiled under blossoming umbrage, flowed +gloriously down hill; gloriously issuing in wide-tufted undulating +plain country, rich in all charms of field and town. Waving blooming +country of the brightest green, dotted all over with handsome villas, +handsome groves crossed by roads and human traffic, here inaudible, or +heard only as a musical hum; and behind all swam, under olive-tinted +haze, the illimitable limitary ocean of London, with its domes and +steeples definite in the sun, big Paul's and the many memories attached +to it hanging high over all. Nowhere of its kind could you see a grander +prospect on a bright summer day, with the set of the air going southward + – southward, and so draping with the city smoke not <i>you</i> but the +city."</p> + +<p>Then comes the invariable final touch, the one dash of black – or green, +shall we call it – without which the master left no picture that had a +human figure in the foreground: – </p> + +<p>"Here for hours would Coleridge talk concerning all conceivable or +inconceivable things; and liked nothing better than to have an +intelligent, or, failing that, even a silent and patient human +listener. He distinguished himself to all that ever heard him as at +least the most surprising talker extant in this world, – and to some +small minority, by no means to all, as the most excellent."</p> + +<p>Then follows the well-known, wonderfully vivid, cynically pathetic, +sketch of the man: – </p> + +<p>"The good man – he was now getting old, towards sixty perhaps, and +gave you the idea of a life that had been full of sufferings; a +life heavy-laden, half-vanquished, still swimming painfully in +seas of manifold physical and other bewilderment. Brow and +head were round and of massive weight, but the face was flabby and +irresolute. The deep eyes, of a light hazel, were as full of sorrow as +of inspiration; confused pain looked mildly from them, as in a kind of +mild astonishment. The whole figure and air, good and amiable +otherwise, might be called flabby and irresolute; expressive of +weakness under possibility of strength. He hung loosely on his limbs, +with knees bent, and stooping attitude; in walking he rather shuffled +than decisively stept; and a lady once remarked he never could fix +which side of the gardenwalk would suit him best, but continually +shifted, corkscrew fashion, and kept trying both; a heavy-laden, high-aspiring, and surely much-suffering man. His voice, naturally soft and +good, had contracted itself into a plaintive snuffle and singsong; he +spoke as if preaching – you could have said preaching earnestly and +almost hopelessly the weightiest things. I still recollect his 'object' +and 'subject,' terms of continual recurrence in the Kantean province; +and how he sang and snuffled them into 'om-m-ject' and 'sum-m-mject,' +with a kind of solemn shake or quaver as he rolled along. [<a href="#foot_12-2">2</a>] No talk +in his century or in any other could be more surprising."</p> + +<p>Such, as he appeared to this half-contemptuous, half-compassionate, +but ever acute observer, was Coleridge at this the zenith of his +influence over the nascent thought of his day. Such to Carlyle +seemed the <i>manner</i> of the deliverance of the oracles; in his +view of their matter, as we all know from an equally well-remembered +passage, his tolerance disappears, and his account here, with all +its racy humour, is almost wholly impatient. Talk, "suffering no +interruption, however reverent," "hastily putting aside all foreign +additions, annotation, or most ingenuous desires for elucidation, as +well-meant superfluities which would never do;" talk "not flowing +anywhither, like a river, but spreading everywhither in inextricable +currents and regurgitations like a lake or sea;" a "confused +unintelligible flood of utterance, threatening to submerge all known +landmarks of thought and drown the world with you" – this, it must be +admitted, is not an easily recognisable description of the Word of +Life. Nor, certainly, does Carlyle's own personal experience of its +preaching and effects – he having heard the preacher talk "with eager +musical energy two stricken hours, his face radiant and moist, and +communicate no meaning whatsoever to any individual of his hearers," + – certain of whom, the narrator for one, "still kept eagerly +listening in hope, while the most had long before given up and formed +(if the room was large enough) humming groups of their own." "He +began anywhere," continues this irresistibly comic sketch; "you put +some question to him, made some suggestive observation; instead of +answering this, or decidedly setting out towards an answer of it, he +would accumulate formidable apparatus, logical swim-bladders, +transcendental life-preservers, and other precautionary and +vehiculatory gear for setting out; perhaps did at last get under way + – but was swiftly solicited, turned aside by the flame of some +radiant new game on this hand or on that into new courses, and ever +into new; and before long into all the universe, where it was +uncertain what game you would catch, or whether any." He +had, indeed, according to the dissatisfied listener, "not the least +talent for explaining this or anything to them; and you swam and +fluttered on the mistiest, wide, unintelligible deluge of things for +most part in a rather profitless uncomfortable manner." And the few +vivid phrases of eulogy which follow seem only to deepen by contrast +the prevailing hue of the picture. The "glorious islets" which were +sometimes seen to "rise out of the haze," the "balmy sunny islets of +the blest and the intelligible, at whose emergence the secondary +humming group would all cease humming and hang breathless upon the +eloquent words, till once your islet got wrapped in the mist again, and +they would recommence humming" – these, it seems to be suggested, but +rarely revealed themselves; but "eloquent, artistically expressive +words you always had; piercing radiances of a most subtle insight came +at intervals; tones of noble pious sympathy recognisable as pious +though strangely coloured, were never wanting long; but, in general, +you could not call this aimless cloud-capt, cloud-bound, lawlessly +meandering discourse, by the name of excellent talk, but only of +surprising.... The moaning sing-song of that theosophico-metaphysical +monotony left in you at last a very dreary feeling."</p> + +<p>It is tolerably clear, I think, that some considerable discount must +be allowed upon the sum of disparagement in this famous criticism. We have +learnt, indeed, to be more on the look-out for the disturbing influences +of temperament in the judgments of this atrabilious observer than was the +case when the <i>Life of Sterling</i> was written, and it is difficult +to doubt that the unfavourable strokes in the above-quoted description +have been unduly multiplied and deepened, partly in the mere +waywardness of a sarcastic humour, and partly perhaps from a less +excusable cause. It is always dangerous to accept one remarkable +talker's view of the characteristics of another; and if this is true of +men who merely compete with each other in the ordinary give-and-take of +the dinner-table epigrammatist and <i>raconteur,</i> the caution is +doubly necessary in the case of two rival prophets – two competing +oracles. There are those among us who hold that the conversation of the +Chelsea sage, in his later years, resembled his own description of the +Highgate philosopher's, in this, at any rate, that it was mightily +intolerant of interruption; and one is apt to suspect that at no time +of his life did Carlyle "understand duologue" much better than +Coleridge. It is probable enough, therefore, that the young lay-preacher did not quite relish being silenced by the elder, and that his +account of the sermons was coloured by the recollection that his own +remained undelivered. There is an abundance of evidence that the +"glorious islets" emerged far more often from the transcendental haze +than Carlyle would have us suppose. Hazlitt, a bitter assailant of +Coleridge's, and whose caustic remark that "his talk was excellent if +you let him start from no premisses and come to no conclusion" is cited +with approval by Carlyle, has elsewhere spoken of Coleridge as the only +person from whom he ever learned anything, has said of him that though +he talked on for ever you wished him to talk on for ever, that "his +thoughts did not seem to come with labour and effort, but as if borne +on the gusts of genius, and as if the wings of his imagination lifted +him from his feet." And besides this testimony to the eloquence which +Carlyle only but inadequately recognises, one should set for what it is +worth De Quincey's evidence to that consequence of thought which +Carlyle denies altogether. To De Quincey the complaint that Coleridge +wandered in his talk appeared unjust. According to him the great +discourser only "seemed to wander," and he seemed to wander the most +"when in fact his resistance to the wandering instinct was greatest, +viz. when the compass and huge circuit by which his illustrations moved +travelled farthest into remote regions before they began to revolve. +Long before this coming round commenced most people had lost him, and, +naturally enough, supposed that he had lost himself. They continued to +admire the separate beauty of the thoughts, but did not see their +relations to the dominant theme." De Quincey however, declares +positively in the faith of his "long and intimate knowledge of +Coleridge's mind, that logic the most severe was as inalienable from +his modes of thinking as grammar from his language."</p> + +<p>Nor should we omit the testimony of another, a more partial, perhaps, +but even better informed judge. The <i>Table Talk</i>, edited by Mr. +Nelson Coleridge, shows how pregnant, how pithy, how full of subtle +observation, and often also of playful humour, could be the talk of +the great discourser in its lighter and more colloquial forms. The +book indeed is, to the thinking of one, at any rate, of its frequent +readers, among the most delightful in the world. But thus speaks its +editor of his uncle's conversation in his more serious moods: – </p> + +<p>"To pass an entire day with Coleridge was a marvellous change indeed +[from the talk of daily life]. It was a Sabbath past expression, deep +and tranquil and serene. You came to a man who had travelled in many +countries and in critical times; who had seen and felt the world in +most of its ranks and in many of its vicissitudes and weaknesses; one +to whom all literature and art were absolutely subject; and to whom, +with a reasonable allowance as to technical details, all science was, +in a most extraordinary degree, familiar. Throughout a long-drawn +summer's day would this man talk to you in low, equable, but clear +and musical tones concerning things Iranian and divine; marshalling +all history, harmonising all experiment, probing the depths of your +consciousness, and revealing visions of glory and terror to the +imagination; but pouring withal such floods of light upon the mind +that you might for a season, like Paul, become blind in the very act +of conversion. And this he would do without so much as one allusion +to himself, without a word of reflection upon others, save when any +given art fell naturally in the way of his discourse; without one +anecdote that was not proof and illustration of a previous position; + – gratifying no passion, indulging no caprice, but, with a calm +mastery over your soul, leading you onward and onward for ever +through a thousand windings, yet with no pause, to some magnificent +point in which, as in a focus, all the parti-coloured rays of his +discourse should converge in light. In all these he was, in truth, +your teacher and guide; but in a little while you might forget that +he was other than a fellow-student and the companion of your way – +so playful was his manner, so simple his language, so affectionate the +glance of his eye!"</p> + +<p>Impressive, however, as these displays may have been, it is impossible +to suppose that their direct didactic value as discourses was at +all considerable. Such as it was, moreover, it was confined in all +probability to an extremely select circle of followers. A few +mystics of the type of Maurice, a few eager seekers after truth +like Sterling, may have gathered, or fancied they gathered, distinct +dogmatic instruction from the Highgate oracles; and no doubt, to the +extent of his influence over the former of these disciples, we may +justly credit Coleridge's discourses with having exercised a real if +only a transitory directive effect upon nineteenth-century thought. But +the terms in which his influence is sometimes spoken of appear, as far +as one can judge of the matter at this distance of time, to be greatly +exaggerated. To speak of it in the same way as we are – or were – +accustomed to speak of the influence of Carlyle, is to subject it to an +altogether inappropriate comparison. It is not merely that Coleridge +founded no recognisable school, for neither did Carlyle. It is that the +former can show absolutely nothing at all resembling that sort of power +which enabled the latter to lay hold upon all the youthful minds of his +time – minds of the most disparate orders and associated with the utmost +diversities of temperament, and detain them in a captivity which, brief +as it may have been in some cases, has in no case failed to leave its +marks behind it. Over a few spirits already prepared to receive them +Coleridge's teachings no doubt exerted power, but he led no soul +captive against its will. There are few middle-aged men of active +intelligence at the present day who can avoid a confession of having +"taken" Carlylism in their youth; but no mental constitutions not +predisposed to it could ever have caught Coleridgism at all. There is +indeed no moral theory of life, there are no maxims of conduct, such as +youth above all things craves for, in Coleridge's teaching. Apart from +the intrinsic difficulties of the task to which he invites his +disciples, it labours under a primary and essential disadvantage of +postponing moral to intellectual liberation. Contrive somehow or other +to attain to just ideas as to the capacities and limitations of the +human consciousness, considered especially in relation to its two +important and eternally distinct functions, the Reason and the +Understanding: and peace of mind shall in due time be added unto you. +That is in effect Coleridge's answer to the inquirer who consults him; +and if the distinction between the Reason and the Understanding were as +obvious as it is obscure to the average unmetaphysical mind, and of a +value as assured for the purpose to which Coleridge applies it as it is +uncertain, the answer would nevertheless send many a would-be disciple +sorrowful away. His natural impulse is to urge the oracle to tell him +whether there be not some one moral attitude which he can wisely and +worthily adopt towards the universe, whatever theory he may form of his +mental relations to it, or without forming any such theory at all. And +it was because Carlyle supplied, or was believed to supply an answer, +such as it was, to this universal question, that his train of +followers, voluntary and involuntary, permanent and temporary, has been +so large.</p> + +<p>It appears to me, therefore, on as careful an examination of +the point as the data admit of, that Coleridge's position in these +latter days of his life has been somewhat mythically exalted by the +generation which succeeded him. There are, I think, distinct traces of +a Coleridgian legend which has only slowly died out. The actual truth I +believe to be that Coleridge's position from 1818 or 1820 till his +death, though one of the greatest eminence, was in no sense one of the +highest, or even of any considerable influence. Fame and honour, in the +fullest measure, were no doubt his: in that matter, indeed, he was only +receiving payment of long-delayed arrears. The poetic school with which +he was, though not with entire accuracy, associated had outlived its +period of contempt and obloquy. In spite of the two quarterlies, the +Tory review hostile, its Whig rival coldly silent, the public had +recognised the high imaginative merit of <i>Christabel;</i> and who +knows but that if the first edition of the <i>Lyrical Ballads</i> had +appeared at this date instead of twenty years before, it would have +obtained a certain number of readers even among landsmen? [<a href="#foot_12-2">2</a>] But over +and above the published works of the poet there were those +extraordinary personal characteristics to which the fame of his works +of course attracted a far larger share than formerly of popular +attention. A remarkable man has more attractive power over the mass of +mankind than the most remarkable of books, and it was because the +report of Coleridge among those who knew him was more stimulating to +public curiosity than even the greatest of his poems, that his +celebrity in these latter years attained such proportions. Wordsworth +said that though "he had seen many men do wonderful things, Coleridge +was the only wonderful man he had ever met," and it was not the doer of +wonderful things but the wonderful man that English society in those +days went out for to see. Seeing would have been enough, but for a +certain number there was hearing too, with the report of it for all; +and it is not surprising that fame of the marvellous discourser should, +in mere virtue of his extraordinary power of improvised speech, his +limitless and untiring mastery of articulate words, have risen to a +height to which writers whose only voice is in their pens can never +hope to attain.</p> + +<p>A reputation of that kind, however, must necessarily perish with its +possessor; and Coleridge's posthumous renown has grown, his place in +English literature has become more assured, if it has not been even +fixed higher, since his death than during his lifetime. This +is, in part no doubt, one among the consequences of those very defects +of character which so unfortunately limited his actual achievements. He +has been credited by faith, as it were, with those famous "unwritten +books" of which he assured Charles Lamb that the titles alone would +fill a volume, and such "popular reputation," in the strict sense of +the word, as he has left behind him, is measured rather by what he was +thought capable of doing than by what he did. By serious students, +however, the real worth of Coleridge will be differently estimated. For +them his peculiar value to English literature is not only undiminished +by the incompleteness of his work; it has been, in a certain sense, +enhanced thereby. Or, perhaps, it would be more strictly accurate to +say that the value could not have existed without the incompleteness. A +Coleridge with the faculty of concentration, and the habit of method +superadded – a Coleridge capable of becoming possessed by any one form +of intellectual energy to the exclusion of all others – might, indeed, +have left behind him a more enduring reputation as a philosopher, and +possibly (although this, for reasons already stated, is, in my own +opinion, extremely doubtful) bequeathed to his countrymen more poetry +destined to live; but, unquestionably, he would never have been able to +render that precise service to modern thought and literature which, in +fact, they owe to him. To have exercised his vivifying and fertilising +influence over the minds of others his intellect was bound to be of the +dispersive order; it was essential that he should "take all knowledge +to be his province," and that that eager, subtle, and penetrative mind +should range as freely as it did over subject after subject of human +interest; – illuminating each of them in turn with those rays of true +critical insight which, amid many bewildering cross-lights and some few +downright <i>ignes fatui,</i> flash forth upon us from all Coleridge's +work.</p> + +<p>Of the personal weaknesses which prevented the just development +of the powers, enough, perhaps, has been incidentally said in the +course of this volume. But, in summing up his history, I shall not, I +trust, be thought to judge the man too harshly in saying that, though +the natural disadvantages of wretched health, almost from boyhood +upward, must, in common fairness, be admitted in partial excuse for his +failure, they do not excuse it altogether. It is difficult not to feel +that Coleridge's character, apart altogether from defects of physical +constitution, was wanting in manliness of fibre. His willingness to +accept assistance at the hands of others is too manifestly displayed +even at the earlier and more robust period of his life. It would be a +mistake, of course, in dealing with a literary man of Coleridge's era, +to apply the same standards as obtain in our own days. Wordsworth, as +we have seen, made no scruple to accept the benevolences of the +Wedgwoods. Southey, the type of independence and self-help, was, for +some years, in receipt of a pension from a private source. But +Coleridge, as Miss Meteyard's disclosures have shown, was at all times +far more willing to depend upon others, and was far less scrupulous +about soliciting their bounty, than was either of his two friends. Had +he shared more of the spirit which made Johnson refuse to owe to the +benevolence of others what Providence had enabled him to do for +himself, it might have been better, no doubt, for the world and for the +work which he did therein.</p> + +<p>But when we consider what that work was, how varied and how wonderful, +it seems idle – nay, it seems ungrateful and ungracious – to speculate +too curiously on what further or other benefits this great intellect +might have conferred upon mankind, had its possessor been endowed with +those qualities of resolution and independence which he lacked. That +Coleridge so often only <i>shows</i> the way, and so seldom guides our +steps along it to the end, is no just ground of complaint. It would be +as unreasonable to complain of a beacon-light that it is not a steam-tug, +and forget in the incompleteness of its separate services the glory of +their number. It is a more reasonable objection that the light itself +is too often liable to obscuration, – that it stands erected upon a rock +too often enshrouded by the mists of its encircling sea. But even this +objection should not too greatly weigh with us. It would be wiser and +better for us to dwell rather upon its splendour and helpfulness in the +hours of its efficacy, to think how vast is then the expanse of waters +which it illuminates, and its radiance how steady and serene.</p> + +<blockquote style="font-variant: small-caps"><strong>Footnotes</strong></blockquote> + +<p><a name="foot_12-1"></a>1. No one who recollects the equally singular manner in which another +most distinguished metaphysician – the late Dean Hansel – was wont to +quaver forth his admirably turned and often highly eloquent phrases of +philosophical exposition, can fail to be reminded of him by the above +description. No two temperaments or histories however could be more +dissimilar. The two philosophers resembled each other in nothing save +the "om-mject" and "sum-mject" of their studies.</p> + +<p><a name="foot_12-2"></a>2. The Longmans told Coleridge that the greater part of the first +edition of the Lyrical Ballads had been sold to seafaring men, who, +having heard of the <i>Ancient Mariner</i>, took the volume for a naval +song-book.</p> + + + +<a name="index"></a> +<h2>Index</h2> + +<div class="index"> + +<p>Adams, Dr.,</p> + +<p><i>Aeolian Harp,</i><br /> + circumstances under which it was written,<br /> + Coleridge's opinion of,</p> + +<p><i>Aids to Reflection,</i><br /> + its popularity,<br /> + its value as a spiritual manual,<br /> + its inferiority from a literary point of view,</p> + +<p>Allan Bank,</p> + +<p>Allsop, Mr. Thomas,</p> + +<p><i>Ancient Mariner,</i><br /> + how and when first conceived,<br /> + its uniqueness,<br /> + Wordsworth's account of its origin<br /> + and of his suggestions,<br /> + a sublime "pot-boiler,"<br /> + realistic force of its narrative,<br /> + its vividness of imagery,<br /> + its wonderful word-pictures,<br /> + its evenness of execution,<br /> + examples of its consummate art,<br /> + its chief characteristics,</p> + +<p>Anecdotes,</p> + +<p>Ball, Sir Alexander,</p> + +<p>Beaumont, Lady,</p> + +<p>Berkeley,</p> + +<p><i>Biographia Literaria,</i><br /> + its interest, critical and illustrative,<br /> + its main value,<br /> + its analysis of the principles of poetry,<br /> + its examination of Wordsworth's theory,<br /> + its contents,</p> + +<p><i>Blackwood's Magazine,</i><br /> + Coleridge's contributions to,</p> + +<p>Bonaparte,</p> + +<p><i>Borderers</i> (Wordsworth's),</p> + +<p>Bowles, William Lisle,</p> + +<p>Burke,<br /> + sonnet to,</p> + +<p>Byron,</p> + +<p>Calne, Coleridge at,</p> + +<p><i>Cambridge Intelligencer </i>(Flower's),</p> + +<p>Carlyle, description of Coleridge by,</p> + +<p>Carrlyon, Dr.,<br /> + reminiscences of Coleridge in Germany by,</p> + +<p><i>Christabel,</i><br /> + Coleridge's opinion of,<br /> + its unfinished condition,<br /> + the lines on the "spell,"<br /> + its high place as a work of creative art,<br /> + its fragmentary beauties,<br /> + the description of Christabel's chamber,<br /> + its main idea,<br /> + outline of the unfinished parts,<br /> + Lamb and Hartley Coleridge on,<br /> + its perfection from the metrical point of view,<br /> + publication of the second part,<br /> + its popularity,<br /> + Coleridge's great desire to complete it,</p> + +<p><i>Circassian Love Chant</i>,<br /> + its charm of melody,</p> + +<p>Coleridge, Samuel Taylor.<br /> + His biographers,<br /> + birth and family history,<br /> + his boyhood and school days,<br /> + early childhood,<br /> + death of his father,<br /> + goes to Christ's Hospital,<br /> + goes to Jesus College, Cambridge,<br /> + wins the Browne Gold Medal,<br /> + leaves Cambridge suddenly and enlists in the army,<br /> + his discharge,<br /> + returns to Cambridge,<br /> + his meeting with Southey and Sara Fricker (his future wife),<br /> + writes the <i>Fall of Robespierre</i> with Southey,<br /> + leaves Cambridge,<br /> + delivers the Bristol lectures,<br /> + marries Sara Fricker at Bristol,<br /> + writes the <i>Aeolian Harp</i>,<br /> + plunges into politics and journalism,<br /> + projects the <i>Watchman</i> and goes on a canvassing tour,<br /> + preaches Unitarian sermons by the way,<br /> + brings out the <i>Watchman</i>,<br /> + retires to a cottage in Somersetshire with Charles Lloyd,<br /> + his meeting with Wordsworth,<br /> + cooling of his revolutionary enthusiasm,<br /> + his intercourse with Wordsworth,<br /> + writes <i>Osorio</i>,<br /> + his rambles with Wordsworth among the Quantock Hills,<br /> + projects the <i>Lyrical Ballads</i>,<br /> + writes the <i>Ancient Mariner</i>,<br /> + <i>Christabel</i>,<br /> + <i>Love</i>,<br /> + <i>Kubla Khan</i>,<br /> + undertakes the duties of a Unitarian preacher at Shrewsbury,<br /> + accepts an annuity from the two Wedgwoods,<br /> + goes to Germany with the Wordsworths,<br /> + returns to England after a year's absence,<br /> + translates Schiller's <i>Wallenstein</i>,<br /> + devotes himself again to journalism,<br /> + goes to the Lake country,<br /> + takes opium as an anodyne,<br /> + writes the <i>Ode to Dejection</i>,<br /> + goes on a tour with Thomas Wedgwood,<br /> + visits the Wordsworths at Grasmere,<br /> + his illness there,<br /> + goes to Malta,<br /> + ill effects of his stay there,<br /> + becomes Secretary to the Governor of the island,<br /> + goes to Italy,<br /> + returns to England after two and a half years' absence,<br /> + his wretched condition of mind and body,<br /> + estrangement from his wife,<br /> + domestic unhappiness,<br /> + meeting with De Quincey,<br /> + pecuniary embarrassments,<br /> + his lectures at the Royal Institution,<br /> + lives with Wordsworth at Allan Bank,<br /> + founds and edits the <i>Friend</i>,<br /> + delivers lectures on Shakespeare,<br /> + returns to journalism,<br /> + his necessities,<br /> + loses his annuity,<br /> + neglect of his family,<br /> + successful production of his play <i>Remorse</i>,<br /> + lectures again at Bristol,<br /> + retires to Calne with Mr. Morgan,<br /> + more financial troubles,<br /> + lives with Dr. Gillman at Highgate,<br /> + undergoes medical treatment for the opium habit,<br /> + returning health and vigour,<br /> + renewed literary activity,<br /> + writes the <i>Biographia Literaria</i>,<br /> + lectures again in London,<br /> + more money troubles,<br /> + publishes <i>Aids to Reflection</i>,<br /> + accompanies Wordsworth on a tour up the Rhine,<br /> + his declining years,<br /> + contemplation of his approaching end,<br /> + his death,</p> + +<p>Poet and Thinker.<br /> + His early bent towards poetry and metaphysics,<br /> + his prose style,<br /> + his early poems, their merits and defects,<br /> + his sonnets,<br /> + Coleridge at his best,<br /> + untimely decline of his poetic impulse,<br /> + Wordsworth's great influence on him,<br /> + Coleridge's mastery of the true ballad manner,<br /> + estimate of his poetic work,<br /> + comparison with Byron and Wordsworth,<br /> + his wonderful power of melody,<br /> + his great projects,<br /> + his critical powers,<br /> + his criticism of Shakespeare,<br /> + his philosophy,<br /> + his contemplated "Great Work,"<br /> + his materials for various poems,<br /> + his metaphysics and theology,<br /> + his discourses,<br /> + exaggerated notions of his position and influence,<br /> + his "unwritten books,"</p> + +<p> Precocious boyhood,<br /> + descriptions of him at various times,<br /> + his voice,<br /> + his conduct as a husband,<br /> + religious nature,<br /> + revolutionary enthusiasm,<br /> + consciousness of his great powers,<br /> + generous admiration for the gifts of others,<br /> + his womanly softness,<br /> + his pride in his personal appearance,<br /> + his contempt for money,<br /> + his ill-health,<br /> + his opium-eating,<br /> + his restlessness,<br /> + best portrait of him,<br /> + his unbusinesslike nature,<br /> + sorrows of his life,<br /> + his laudanum excesses,<br /> + his talk,<br /> + his weaknesses,</p> + +<p>Coleridge, Mrs.,</p> + +<p>Coleridge, Rev. Derwent,</p> + +<p>Coleridge, Rev. George,</p> + +<p>Coleridge, Hartley,</p> + +<p>Coleridge, Rev. John,</p> + +<p>Coleridge, Luke,</p> + +<p>Coleridge, Nelson,</p> + +<p>Coleridge, Sarah,</p> + +<p><i>Coleridge and Opium Eating</i> (De Quincey's),</p> + +<p><i>Condones ad Populum </i>(Bristol Lectures),<br /> + their warmth of language,<br /> + evidence of deep thought and reasoning in,<br /> + their crudeness,</p> + +<p>Consulate, Coleridge on the French,</p> + +<p>Cottle, Joseph,</p> + +<p><i>Courier, The,</i></p> + +<p><i>Dark Ladie,</i></p> + +<p><i>Dejection, Ode to,</i><br /> + Coleridge's swan song,<br /> + its promise,<br /> + Coleridge's spiritual and moral losses bewailed in,<br /> + stanzas from,<br /> + biographical value of,</p> + +<p>De Quincey,</p> + +<p>Descartes,</p> + +<p><i>Descriptive Sketches </i>(Wordsworth's),</p> + +<p><i>Devil's Thoughts,</i></p> + +<p><i>Early Years and Late Reflections</i> (Dr. Carrlyon's),</p> + +<p><i>Effusions,</i></p> + +<p>Erasmus,</p> + +<p><i>Essays on his own Times,</i></p> + +<p><i>Eve of St Agnes</i> (Keats's),</p> + +<p><i>Excursion</i> (Wordsworth's),</p> + +<p><i>Fall of Robespierre</i>,</p> + +<p><i>Fears in Solitude</i>,</p> + +<p><i>Fire, Famine and Slaughter</i>,</p> + +<p>Fox, Letters to,</p> + +<p>France, Coleridge on,<br /> + ode to,</p> + +<p>Fricker, Edith,<br /> + Mary,<br /> + Sara,</p> + +<p><i>Friend, The</i>,<br /> + Coleridge's object in starting it,<br /> + its short-lived career,<br /> + causes of its failure,<br /> + compared with the <i>Spectator</i>,</p> + +<p><i>Frost at Midnight</i> (lines),</p> + +<p>Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire,<br /> + Ode to,</p> + +<p>Germany, Coleridge and Wordsworth in,</p> + +<p>Gibbon,</p> + +<p>Gillman, Mr.,</p> + +<p>Green, Mr. J. H.,</p> + +<p>Grenville, Lord,</p> + +<p>Greta Hall, description of,</p> + +<p><i>Group of Englishmen</i> (Miss Meteyard's),</p> + +<p>Harz Mountains, Coleridge's tour through the,</p> + +<p>Hazlitt,</p> + +<p>Hume,</p> + +<p><i>Joan of Arc</i> (Southey's), Coleridge's contribution to,</p> + +<p>Johnson, Samuel,</p> + +<p><i>Juvenile Poems</i>,</p> + +<p>Kean,</p> + +<p>Keats,<br />Coleridge's meeting with and description of,</p> + +<p>Keswick,</p> + +<p><i>Kosciusko</i> (Sonnet),</p> + +<p><i>Kubla Khan</i>,<br /> + a wild dream-poem,<br /> + its curious origin,<br /> + when written,</p> + +<p><i>Lake Poets</i> (De Quincey's),</p> + +<p>Lamb, Charles,</p> + +<p>Lamb, Mary,</p> + +<p><i>Lay Sermons</i>,</p> + +<p>"Lear,": Coleridge on,</p> + +<p>Lectures, Coleridge's,<br /> + at Bristol,<br /> + at the Royal Institution,<br /> + on Shakespeare and Milton,<br /> + at Flower de Luce Court,<br /> + extempore lecture,</p> + +<p>Le Grice, Charles,</p> + +<p><i>Liberal, The</i>,</p> + +<p><i>Lines on ascending the Bracken</i>,</p> + +<p><i>Lines to William Wordsworth</i>,</p> + +<p><i>Literary Remains</i>,</p> + +<p>Lloyd, Charles,</p> + +<p>Locke,</p> + +<p><i>Love</i>,<br /> + fascination of melody in,</p> + +<p>Lovell, Robert,</p> + +<p><i>Lover's Resolution</i>,</p> + +<p>Luther,</p> + +<p><i>Lyrical Ballads</i>,<br /> + origin of,<br /> + Coleridge's contributions to,<br /> + appearance of,<br /> + anecdote concerning,</p> + +<p>Malta, Coleridge's stay at,</p> + +<p>Maurice,</p> + +<p>Metaphysics and theology;<br /> + Coleridge's,</p> + +<p>Meteyard, Miss,</p> + +<p>Milton,<br /> + lectures on Shakespeare and,</p> + +<p><i>Monody on the Death of Chatterton</i>,</p> + +<p>Montagu, Mr. and Mrs.,</p> + +<p>Morgan, Mr. John,</p> + +<p><i>Morning Post, The</i>,<br /> + Coleridge's connection with,</p> + +<p>Nether Stowey, Coleridge at,</p> + +<p><i>New Monthly Magazine</i>,</p> + +<p><i>Nightingale</i>,</p> + +<p><i>Omniana</i> (Southey's),<br /> + Coleridge's contribution to,</p> + +<p>Opium,<br /> + Coleridge's resort to,<br /> + origin of the habit,<br /> + De Quincey on,</p> + +<p><i>Pains of Sleep</i>,</p> + +<p>"Pantisocraey,"</p> + +<p>Parry, Coleridge's fellow-student in Germany,</p> + +<p><i>Peau de Chagrin</i> (Balzac's),</p> + +<p>Philosophy, Coleridge's,<br /> + (see <i>Spiritual Philosophy</i>)</p> + +<p><i>Pilgrimage</i> (Purchas's),</p> + +<p>Pitt,<br /> + sonnet to,</p> + +<p>Pius VII., Pope,</p> + +<p><i>Poems on Various Subjects</i>,</p> + +<p><i>Poetical and Dramatic Works</i>,</p> + +<p>Poetry and the Fine Arts, Coleridge's lectures on,</p> + +<p>"Polonius,"<br /> + Coleridge's estimate of the character of,</p> + +<p>Poole, Mr. Thomas,</p> + +<p><i>Prometheus</i>, Coleridge's paper on,</p> + +<p>Quantock Hills, Coleridge and Wordsworth among the,</p> + +<p><i>Recantation</i>,</p> + +<p><i>Recollections</i> (Cottle's),</p> + +<p><i>Recollections of a Literary Life</i> (Miss Mitford's)</p> + +<p><i>Reflections on having left a Place of Retirement</i>,</p> + +<p><i>Religious Musings</i>,</p> + +<p><i>Remorse</i>,</p> + +<p>Revolution, the French,</p> + +<p><i>Robbers</i>,</p> + +<p>Rome, Coleridge in,</p> + +<p>Rousseau,</p> + +<p>Royal Institution, Coleridge's lectures at the,</p> + +<p>Schiller,</p> + +<p>Schlegel,</p> + +<p>Scott, Sir Walter,</p> + +<p><i>Sermons, Lay</i>,</p> + +<p>Shakespeare,<br /> + lectures on,<br /> + criticisms on,</p> + +<p>Shakespearianism, German,</p> + +<p>Shelley,</p> + +<p>Sheridan,</p> + +<p>Shrewsbury,<br /> + Coleridge's preaching in,</p> + +<p><i>Sibylline Leaves</i>,</p> + +<p>Slave Trade,<br /> + Coleridge's Greek Ode on the,</p> + +<p><i>Songs of the Pixies</i>,</p> + +<p><i>Sonnets on Eminent Characters</i>,</p> + +<p>Sotheby, Mr.,</p> + +<p>Southey,</p> + +<p>Southey, Cuthbert,</p> + +<p>Southey, Edith,</p> + +<p><i>Spectator</i>,</p> + +<p><i>Spiritual Philosophy</i> (Green's),<br /> + an exposition of Coleridge's Philosophy,<br /> + Coleridge's great fundamental principle,<br /> + the reason and the understanding,<br /> + will, not thought, the ultimate fact of self-consciousness,<br /> + a philosophy of Realism,<br /> + philosophy valued by Coleridge mainly as an organon of religion,<br /> + growth of the soul,<br /> + the idea of God,<br /> + idea of the Trinity,<br /> + "a guidebook written in hieroglyphics,"</p> + +<p><i>Statesman's Manual</i>,</p> + +<p><i>Sterling, Life of</i> (Carlyle's),</p> + +<p>Sterne,</p> + +<p>Stuart, Mr. Daniel,</p> + +<p>Swinburne's praise of Coleridge's lyrics,</p> + +<p><i>Table Talk</i>,</p> + +<p>Theology and metaphysics, Coleridge's system of,</p> + +<p>Unitarian, Coleridge as a,</p> + +<p><i>Visionary Hope</i>,</p> + +<p>Voltaire,</p> + +<p><i>Voyages</i> (Shelvocke's),</p> + +<p><i>Wallenstein</i>, Coleridge's translation of,</p> + +<p>Warburton,</p> + +<p><i>Watchman</i>,</p> + +<p>Wedgwood, Josiah,</p> + +<p>Wedgwood, Thomas,</p> + +<p>Wordsworth,</p> + +<p>Wordsworth, Dorothy,</p> + +<p><i>Year, Ode to the Departing</i>,</p> + +<p><i>Zapolya</i>,</p> + +</div> + +<p align="center"><strong>The End.</strong></p> + + + + + + + + +<pre> + + + + + +End of Project Gutenberg's English Men of Letters: Coleridge, by H. D. Traill + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS: COLERIDGE *** + +***** This file should be named 6916-h.htm or 6916-h.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + http://www.gutenberg.org/6/9/1/6916/ + +Produced by Curtis A. Weyant, Charles Franks, and the +Distributed Proofreading Team. + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will +be renamed. + +Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright +law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, +so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United +States without permission and without paying copyright +royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part +of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project +Gutenberg-tm electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm +concept and trademark. 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Do not change or edit the +header without written permission. + +Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the +eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file. Included is +important information about your specific rights and restrictions in +how the file may be used. You can also find out about how to make a +donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved. + + +**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts** + +**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971** + +*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!***** + + +Title: English Men of Letters: Coleridge + +Author: H. D. Traill + +Release Date: November, 2004 [EBook #6916] +[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule] +[This file was first posted on February 10, 2003] + +Edition: 10 + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ASCII + +*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS: COLERIDGE *** + + + + +Produced by Curtis A. Weyant, Charles Franks, +and the Distributed Proofreading Team. + + + + +ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS + +COLERIDGE + +BY + +H. D. TRAILL + + + + +PREFATORY NOTE. + + +In a tolerably well-known passage in one of his essays De Quincey +enumerates the multiform attainments and powers of Coleridge, and the +corresponding varieties of demand made by them on any one who should +aspire to become this many-sided man's biographer. The description is +slightly touched with the humorous hyperbole characteristic of its +author; but it is in substance just, and I cannot but wish that it were +possible, within the limits of a preface, to set out the whole of it in +excuse for the many inevitable shortcomings of this volume. Having thus +made an "exhibit" of it, there would only remain to add that the +difficulties with which De Quincey confronts an intending biographer of +Coleridge must necessarily be multiplied many-fold by the conditions +under which this work is here attempted. No complete biography of +Coleridge, at least on any important scale of dimensions, is in +existence; no critical appreciation of his work _as a whole_, and +as correlated with the circumstances and affected by the changes of his +life, has, so far as I am aware, been attempted. To perform either of +these two tasks adequately, or even with any approach to adequacy, a +writer should at least have the elbow-room of a portly volume. To +attempt the two together, therefore, and to attempt them within the +limits prescribed to the manuals of this series, is an enterprise +which I think should claim, from all at least who are not offended by +its audacity, an almost unbounded indulgence. + +The supply of material for a _Life_ of Coleridge is fairly plentiful, +though it is not very easily come by. For the most part it needs to be +hunted up or fished up--those accustomed to the work will appreciate +the difference between the two processes--from a considerable variety +of contemporary documents. Completed biography of the poet-philosopher +there is none, as has been said, in existence; and the one volume of +the unfinished _Life_ left us by Mr. Gillman--a name never to be +mentioned with disrespect, however difficult it may sometimes be to +avoid doing so, by any one who honours the name and genius of +Coleridge--covers, and that in but a loose and rambling fashion, no +more than a few years. Mr. Cottle's _Recollections of Southey, +Wordsworth, and Coleridge_ contains some valuable information on +certain points of importance, as also does the _Letters, Conversations, +etc., of S. T. C._ by Mr. Allsop. Miss Meteyard's _Group of Eminent +Englishmen_ throws much light on the relations between Coleridge and +his early patrons the Wedgwoods. Everything, whether critical or +biographical, that De Quincey wrote on Coleridgian matters requires, +with whatever discount, to be carefully studied. _The Life of Wordsworth,_ +by the Bishop of St. Andrews; _The Correspondence of Southey;_ +the Rev. Derwent Coleridge's brief account of his father's life and +writings; and the prefatory memoir prefixed to the 1880 edition of +Coleridge's _Poetical and Dramatic Works_, have all had to be +consulted. But, after all, there remain several tantalising gaps in +Coleridge's life which refuse to be bridged over; and one cannot but +think that there must be enough unpublished matter in the possession +of his relatives and the representatives of his friends and +correspondents to enable some at least, though doubtless not all, of +these missing links to be supplied. Perhaps upon a fitting occasion +and for an adequate purpose these materials would be forthcoming. + + + + +CONTENTS. + + + +_POETICAL PERIOD._ + +CHAPTER I. +[1772-1794.] +Birth, parentage, and early years--Christ's Hospital--Jesus College, +Cambridge. + +CHAPTER II. +[1794-1797.] +The Bristol Lectures--Marriage--Life at Clevedon--The _Watchman_-- +Retirement to Stowey--Introduction to Wordsworth. + +CHAPTER III. +[1797-1799.] +Coleridge and Wordsworth--Publication of the _Lyrical Ballads_--The +_Ancient Mariner_--The first part of _Christabel_--Decline of +Coleridge's poetic impulse--Final review of his poetry. + + +_CRITICAL PERIOD._ + +CHAPTER IV. +[1799-1800.] +Visit to Germany--Life at Gottingen--Return--Explores the Lake country-- +London--The _Morning Post_--Coleridge as a journalist--Retirement to +Keswick. + +CHAPTER V. +[1800-1804.] +Life at Keswick--Second part of _Christabel_--Failing health--Resort +to opium--The _Ode to Dejection_--Increasing restlessness--Visit to +Malta. + +CHAPTER VI. +[1806-1809.] +Stay at Malta--Its injurious effects--Return to England--Meeting with De +Quincey--Residence in London--First series of lectures. + +CHAPTER VII. +[1809-1810.] +Return to the Lakes--From Keswick to Grasmere--With Wordsworth at Allan +Bank--The _Friend_--Quits the Lake country for ever. + +CHAPTER VIII. +[1810-1816.] +London again--Second recourse to journalism--The _Courier_ articles-- +The Shakespeare lectures--Production of _Remorse_--At Bristol again +as lecturer--Residence at Calne--Increasing ill health and embarrassments +--Retirement to Mr. Gillman's. + + +_METAPHYSICAL AND THEOLOGICAL PERIOD._ + +CHAPTER IX. +[1816-1818.] +Life at Highgate--Renewed activity--Publications and republications--The +_Biographia Literaria_--The lectures of 1818--Coleridge as a +Shakespearian critic. + +CHAPTER X. +[1818-1834.] +Closing years--Temporary renewal of money troubles--The _Aids to +Refection_--Growing weakness-Visit to Germany with the Wordsworths-- +Last illness and death. + +CHAPTER XI. +Coleridge's metaphysics and theology--_The Spiritual Philosophy_ +of Mr. Green. + +CHAPTER XII. +Coleridge's position in his later years--His discourse--His +influence on contemporary thought--Final review of his intellectual +work. + +INDEX. + + + + +COLERIDGE. + + + + + +CHAPTER I. + +Birth, parentage, and early years--Christ's Hospital--Jesus College, +Cambridge. + +[1772-1794.] + + +On the 21st of October 1772 there was added to that roll of famous +Englishmen of whom Devonshire boasts the parentage a new and not its +least illustrious name. SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE was the son of the Rev. +John Coleridge, vicar of Ottery St. Mary in that county, and head +master of Henry VIII.'s Free Grammar School in the same town. He was +the youngest child of a large family. To the vicar, who had been twice +married, his first wife had borne three children, and his second ten. +Of these latter, however, one son died in infancy; four others, +together with the only daughter of the family, passed away before +Samuel had attained his majority; and thus only three of his brothers, +James, Edward, and George Coleridge, outlived the eighteenth century. +The first of these three survivors became the father of Henry Nelson +Coleridge--who married his cousin Sara, the poet's accomplished +daughter, and edited his uncle's posthumous works--and of the late Mr. +Justice Coleridge, himself the father of the present Lord Chief-Justice +of England. Edward, the second of the three, went, like his eldest +brother William, to Pembroke College, Oxford, and like him took orders; +and George, also educated at the same college and for the same +profession, succeeded eventually to his father's benefice and school. +The vicar himself appears from all accounts to have been a man of more +mark than most rural incumbents, and probably than a good many +schoolmasters of his day. He was a Hebrew scholar of some eminence, and +the compiler of a Latin grammar, in which, among other innovations +designed to simplify the study of the language for "boys just +initiated," he proposed to substitute for the name of "ablative" that +of "quale-quare-quidditive case." The mixture of amiable simplicity and +not unamiable pedantry to which this stroke of nomenclature testifies +was further illustrated in his practice of diversifying his sermons to +his village flock with Hebrew quotations, which he always commended to +their attention as "the immediate language of the Holy Ghost"--a +practice which exposed his successor, himself a learned man, to the +complaint of his rustic parishioners, that for all his erudition no +"immediate language of the Holy Ghost" was ever to be heard from +_him_. On the whole the Rev. John Coleridge appears to have been a +gentle and kindly eccentric, whose combination of qualities may have +well entitled him to be compared, as his famous son was wont in after- +life to compare him, to Parson Adams. + +Of the poet's mother we know little; but it is to be gathered from such +information as has come to us through Mr. Gillman from Coleridge +himself that, though reputed to have been a "woman of strong mind," she +exercised less influence on the formation of her son's mind and +character than has frequently been the case with the not remarkable +mothers of remarkable men. "She was," says Mr. Gillman, "an uneducated +woman, industriously attentive to her household duties, and devoted to +the care of her husband and family. Possessing none even of the most +common accomplishments of her day, she had neither love nor sympathy +for the display of them in others. She disliked, as she would say, your +'harpsichord ladies,' and strongly tried to impress upon her sons their +little value" (that is, of the accomplishments) "in their choice of +wives." And the final judgment upon her is that she was "a very good +woman, though, like Martha, over careful in many things; very ambitious +for the advancement of her sons in life, but wanting, perhaps, that +flow of heart which her husband possessed so largely." Of Coleridge's +boyhood and school-days we are fortunate in being able to construct an +unusually clear and complete idea. Both from his own autobiographic +notes, from the traditionary testimony of his family, and from the no +less valuable evidence of his most distinguished schoolfellow, we know +that his youthful character and habits assign him very conspicuously to +that perhaps somewhat small class of eminent men whose boyhood has +given distinct indications of great things to come. Coleridge is as +pronounced a specimen of this class as Scott is of its opposite. Scott +has shown the world how commonplace a boyhood may precede a maturity of +extraordinary powers. In Coleridge's case a boy of truly extraordinary +qualities was father to one of the most remarkable of men. As the +youngest of ten children (or of thirteen, reckoning the vicar's family +of three by his first wife), Coleridge attributes the early bent of his +disposition to causes the potency of which one may be permitted to +think that he has somewhat exaggerated. It is not quite easy to believe +that it was only through "certain jealousies of old Molly," his brother +Frank's "dotingly fond nurse," and the infusions of these jealousies +into his brother's mind, that he was drawn "from life in motion to life +in thought and sensation." The physical impulses of boyhood, where they +exist in vigour, are not so easily discouraged, and it is probable that +they were naturally weaker and the meditative tendency stronger than +Coleridge in after-life imagined. But to continue: "I never played," he +proceeds, "except by myself, and then only acting over what I had been +reading or fancying, or half one, half the other" (a practice common +enough, it may be remarked, among boys of by no means morbidly +imaginative habit), "cutting down weeds and nettles with a stick, as +one of the seven champions of Christendom. Alas! I had all the +simplicity, all the docility of the little child, but none of the +child's habits. I never thought as a child--never had the language of a +child." So it fared with him during the period of his home instruction, +the first eight years of his life; and his father having, as scholar +and schoolmaster, no doubt noted the strange precocity of his youngest +son, appears to have devoted especial attention to his training. "In my +ninth year," he continues, "my most dear, most revered father died +suddenly. O that I might so pass away, if, like him, I were an +Israelite without guile. The image of my father, my revered, kind, +learned, simple-hearted father, is a religion to me." + +Before he had attained his tenth year a presentation to Christ's +Hospital was obtained for him by that eminent judge Mr. Justice Buller, +a former pupil of his father's; and he was entered at the school on the +18th July 1782. His early bent towards poetry, though it displayed +itself in youthful verse of unusual merit, is a less uncommon and +arresting characteristic than his precocious speculative activity. Many +a raw boy "lisps in numbers, for the numbers come;" but few discourse +Alexandrian metaphysics at the same age, for the very good reason that +the metaphysics as a rule do not "come." And even among those youth +whom curiosity, or more often vanity, induces to dabble in such +studies, one would find few indeed over whom they have cast such an +irresistible spell as to estrange them for a while from poetry +altogether. That this was the experience of Coleridge we have his own +words to show. His son and biographer, the Rev. Derwent Coleridge, has +a little antedated the poet's stages of development in stating that +when his father was sent to Christ's Hospital in his eleventh year he +was "already a poet, and yet more characteristically a metaphysician." +A poet, yes, and a precocious scholar perhaps to boot, but a +metaphysician, no; for the "delightful sketch of him by his friend and +schoolfellow Charles Lamb" was pretty evidently taken not at "this +period" of his life but some years later. Coleridge's own account of +the matter in the _Biographia Literaria_ is clear. [1] "At a very +premature age, even before my fifteenth year," he says, "I had +bewildered myself in metaphysics and in theological controversy. +Nothing else pleased me. History and particular facts lost all interest +in my mind. Poetry (though for a schoolboy of that age I was above par +in English versification, and had already produced two or three +compositions which I may venture to say were somewhat above mediocrity, +and which had gained me more credit than the sound good sense of my old +master was at all pleased with),--poetry itself, yea, novels and +romance, became insipid to me." He goes on to describe how highly +delighted he was if, during his friendless wanderings on leave-days, +"any passenger, especially if he were dressed in black," would enter +with him into a conversation, which he soon found the means of +directing to his favourite subject of "providence, foreknowledge, will, +and fate; fixed fate, freewill, foreknowledge absolute." Undoubtedly it +is to this period that one should refer Lamb's well-known description +of "Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Logician, Metaphysician, Bard." + +"How have I seen the casual passer through the cloisters stand still, +entranced with admiration (while he weighed the disproportion between +the speech and the garb of the young Mirandula), to hear thee unfold in +thy deep and sweet intonations the mysteries of Iamblichus or Plotinus +(for even in those years thou waxedst not pale at such philosophic +draughts), or reciting Homer in the Greek, or Pindar, while the walls +of the old Grey Friars re-echoed with the accents of the _inspired +charity-boy_." + +It is interesting to note such a point as that of the "deep and sweet +intonations" of the youthful voice--its most notable and impressive +characteristic in after-life. Another schoolfellow describes the young +philosopher as "tall and striking in person, with long black hair," and +as commanding "much deference" among his schoolfellows. Such was +Coleridge between his fifteenth and seventeenth year, and such +continued to be the state of his mind and the direction of his studies +until he was won back again from what he calls "a preposterous pursuit, +injurious to his natural powers and to the progress of his education," +by--it is difficult, even after the most painstaking study of its +explanations, to record the phenomenon without astonishment--a perusal +of the sonnets of William Lisle Bowles. Deferring, however, for the +present any research into the occult operation of this converting +agency, it will be enough to note Coleridge's own assurance of its +perfect efficacy. He was completely cured for the time of his +metaphysical malady, and "well were it for me perhaps," he exclaims, +"had I never relapsed into the same mental disease; if I had continued +to pluck the flowers and reap the harvest from the cultivated surface +instead of delving in the unwholesome quicksilver mines of metaphysic +depths." And he goes on to add, in a passage full of the peculiar +melancholy beauty of his prose, and full too of instruction for the +biographer, "But if, in after-time, I have sought a refuge from bodily +pain and mismanaged sensibility in abstruse researches, which exercised +the strength and subtlety of the understanding without awakening the +feelings of the heart, there was a long and blessed interval, during +which my natural faculties were allowed to expand and my original +tendencies to develop themselves--my fancy, and the love of nature, and +the sense of beauty in forms and sounds." This "long and blessed +interval" endured, as we shall see, for some eleven or twelve years. + +His own account of his seduction from the paths of poetry by the wiles +of philosophy is that physiology acted as the go-between. His brother +Luke had come up to London to walk the hospitals, and young Samuel's +insatiable intellectual curiosity immediately inspired him with a +desire to share his brother's pursuit. "Every Saturday I could make or +obtain leave, to the London Hospital trudged I. O! the bliss if I was +permitted to hold the plaisters or attend the dressings.... I became +wild to be apprenticed to a surgeon; English, Latin, yea, Greek books +of medicine read I incessantly. Blanchard's _Latin Medical +Dictionary_ I had nearly by heart. Briefly, it was a wild dream, +which, gradually blending with, gradually gave way to, a rage for +metaphysics occasioned by the essays on Liberty and Necessity in Cato's +_Letters_, and more by theology." [2] At the appointed hour, +however, Bowles the emancipator came, as has been said, to his relief, +and having opportunely fallen in love with the eldest daughter of a +widow lady of whose son he had been the patron and protector at school, +we may easily imagine that his liberation from the spell of metaphysics +was complete. "From this time," he says, "to my nineteenth year, when I +quitted school for Jesus, Cambridge, was the era of poetry and love." + +Of Coleridge's university days we know less; but the account of his +schoolfellow, Charles Le Grice, accords, so far as it goes, with what +would have been anticipated from the poet's school life. Although "very +studious," and not unambitious of academical honours--within a few +months of his entering at Jesus he won the Browne Gold Medal for a +Greek Ode on the Slave Trade [3]--his reading, his friend admits, was +"desultory and capricious. He took little exercise merely for the sake +of exercise, but he was ready at any time to unbend his mind in +conversation, and for the sake of this his room was a constant +rendezvous of conversation-loving friends. I will not call them +loungers, for they did not call to kill time but to enjoy it." From the +same record we gather that Coleridge's interest in current politics was +already keen, and that he was an eager reader, not only of Burke's +famous contributions thereto, but even a devourer of all the pamphlets +which swarmed during that agitated period from the press. The desultory +student, however, did not altogether intermit his academical studies. +In 1793 he competed for another Greek verse prize, this time +unsuccessfully. He afterwards described his ode _On Astronomy_ as +"the finest Greek poem I ever wrote;" [4] but, whatever may have been +its merits from the point of view of scholarship, the English +translation of it, made eight years after by Southey (in which form +alone it now exists), seems hardly to establish its title to the +peculiar merit claimed by its author for his earlier effort. The long +vacation of this year, spent by him in Devonshire, is also interesting +as having given birth to one of the most characteristic of the +_Juvenile Poems,_ the _Songs of the Pixies_, and the closing +months of 1793 were marked by the most singular episode in the poet's +earlier career. + +It is now perhaps impossible to ascertain whether the cause of this +strange adventure of Coleridge's was, "chagrin at his disappointment in +a love affair" or "a fit of dejection and despondency caused by some +debts not amounting to a hundred pounds;" but, actuated by some impulse +or other of restless disquietude, Coleridge suddenly quitted Cambridge +and came up, very slenderly provided with money, to London, where, +after a few days' sojourn, he was compelled by pressure of actual need +to enlist, under the name of Silas Titus Comberback (S. T. C.), [5] as a +private in the 15th Light Dragoons. It may seem strange to say so, but +it strikes one as quite conceivable that the world might have been a +gainer if fate had kept Coleridge a little longer in the ranks than the +four months of his actual service. As it was, however, his military +experiences, unlike those of Gibbon, were of no subsequent advantage to +him. He was, as he tells us, an execrable rider, a negligent groom of +his horse, and, generally, a slack and slovenly trooper; but before +drill and discipline had had time to make a smart soldier of him, he +chanced to attract the attention of his captain by having written a +Latin quotation on the white wall of the stables at Reading. This +officer, who it seems was either able to translate the ejaculation, +"Eheu! quam infortunii miserrimum est fuisse felicem," [7] or, at any +rate, to recognise the language it was written in, interested himself +forthwith on behalf of his scholarly recruit. [6] Coleridge's discharge +was obtained at Hounslow on April 10, 1794, and he returned to +Cambridge. + +The year was destined to be eventful for him in more ways than one. In +June he went to Oxford to pay a visit to an old schoolfellow, where an +accidental introduction to Robert Southey, then an undergraduate of +Balliol, laid the foundation of a friendship destined largely to +influence their future lives. In the course of the following August he +came to Bristol, where he was met by Southey, and by him introduced to +Robert Lovell, through whom and Southey he made the acquaintance of two +persons of considerable, if not exactly equal, importance to any young +author--his first publisher and his future wife. Robert Lovell already +knew Mr. Joseph Cottle, brother of Amos Cottle (Byron's "O! Amos +Cottle! Phoebus! what a name"), and himself a poet of some pretensions; +and he had married Mary Fricker, one of whose sisters, Edith, was +already engaged to Southey; while another, Sara, was afterwards to +become Mrs. Coleridge. + +As the marriage turned out on the whole an unhappy one, the present may +be a convenient moment for considering how far its future character was +determined by previously existing and unalterable conditions, and how +far it may be regarded as the result of subsequent events. De Quincey, +whose acute and in many respects most valuable monograph on the poet +touches its point of least trustworthiness in matters of this kind, +declares roundly, and on the alleged authority of Coleridge himself, +that the very primary and essential prerequisite of happiness was +wanting to the union. Coleridge, he says, assured him that his marriage +was "not his own deliberate act, but was in a manner forced upon his +sense of honour by the scrupulous Southey, who insisted that he had +gone too far in his attentions to Miss Fricker for any honourable +retreat." On the other hand, he adds, "a neutral spectator of the +parties protested to me that if ever in his life he had seen a man +under deep fascination, and what he would have called desperately in +love, Coleridge, in relation to Miss F., was that man." One need not, I +think, feel much hesitation in preferring this "neutral spectator's" +statement to that of the discontented husband, made several years after +the mutual estrangement of the couple, and with no great propriety +perhaps, to a new acquaintance. There is abundant evidence in his own +poems alone that at the time of, and for at least two or three years +subsequently to, his marriage Coleridge's feeling towards his wife was +one of profound and indeed of ardent attachment. It is of course quite +possible that the passion of so variable, impulsive, and irresolute a +temperament as his may have had its hot and cold fits, and that during +one of the latter phases Southey may have imagined that his friend +needed some such remonstrance as that referred to. But this is not +nearly enough to support the assertion that Coleridge's marriage was +"in a manner forced upon his sense of honour," and was not his own +deliberate act. It was as deliberate as any of his other acts during +the years 1794 and 1795,--that is to say, it was as wholly inspired by +the enthusiasm of the moment, and as utterly ungoverned by anything in +the nature of calculation on the possibilities of the future. He fell +in love with Sara Fricker as he fell in love with the French Revolution +and with the scheme of "Pantisocracy," and it is indeed extremely +probable that the emotions of the lover and the socialist may have +subtly acted and reacted upon each other. The Pantisocratic scheme was +essentially based at its outset upon a union of kindred souls, for it +was clearly necessary of course that each male member of the little +community to be founded on the banks of the Susquehanna should take +with him a wife. Southey and Lovell had theirs in the persons of two +sisters; they were his friends and fellow-workers in the scheme; and +they had a sympathetic sister-in-law disengaged. Fate therefore seemed +to designate her for Coleridge and with the personal attraction which +she no doubt exerted over him there may well have mingled a dash of +that mysterious passion for symmetry which prompts a man to "complete +the set." After all, too, it must be remembered that, though Mrs. +Coleridge did not permanently retain her hold upon her husband's +affections, she got considerably the better of those who shared them +with her. Coleridge found out the objections to Pantisocracy in a very +short space of time, and a decided coolness had sprung up between him +and Madame la Revolution before another two years had passed. + +The whole history indeed of this latter _liaison_ is most +remarkable, and no one, it seems to me, can hope to form an adequate +conception of Coleridge's essential instability of character without +bestowing somewhat closer attention upon this passage in his +intellectual development than it usually receives. It is not uncommon +to see the cases of Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge lumped together +indiscriminately, as interequivalent illustrations of the way in which +the young and generous minds of that era were first fascinated and then +repelled by the French Revolution. As a matter of fact, however, the +last of the three cases differed in certain very important respects +from the two former. Coleridge not only took the "frenzy-fever" in a +more violent form than either Wordsworth or Southey, and uttered wilder +things in his delirium than they, but the paroxysm was much shorter, +the _immediate_ reaction more violent in its effects and brought +about by slighter causes in his case than in theirs. This will appear +more clearly when we come to contrast the poems of 1794 and 1795 with +those of 1797. For the present it must suffice to say that while the +history of Coleridge's relations to the French Revolution is +intellectually more interesting than that of Wordsworth's and +Southey's, it plainly indicates, even in that early period of the three +lives, a mind far more at the mercy of essentially transitory sentiment +than belonged to either of the others, and far less disposed than +theirs to review the aspirations of the moment by the steady light of +the practical judgment. + +This, however, is anticipating matters. We are still in the summer of +1794, and we left Coleridge at Bristol with Southey, Lovell, and the +Miss Frickers. To this year belongs that remarkable experiment in +playwriting at high pressure, _The Fall of Robespierre_. It +originated, we learn from Southey, in "a sportive conversation at poor +Lovell's," when each of the three friends agreed to produce one act of +a tragedy, on the subject indicated in the above title, by the +following evening. Coleridge was to write the first, Southey the +second, and Lovell the third. Southey and Lovell appeared the next day +with their acts complete, Coleridge, characteristically, with only a +part of his. Lovell's, however, was found not to be in keeping with the +other two, so Southey supplied the third as well as the second, by +which time Coleridge had completed the first. The tragedy was +afterwards published entire, and is usually included in complete +editions of Coleridge's poetical works. It is an extremely immature +production, abounding in such coquettings (if nothing more serious) +with bathos as + + "Now, + Aloof thou standest from the tottering pillar, + And like a frighted child behind its mother, + Hidest thy pale face in the skirts of Mercy." + +and + + "Liberty, condensed awhile, is bursting + To scatter the arch-chemist in the explosion." + +Coleridge also contributed to Southey's _Joan of Arc_ certain +lines of which, many years afterwards, he wrote in this humorously +exaggerated but by no means wholly unjust tone of censure:--"I was +really astonished (1) at the schoolboy, wretched, allegoric machinery; +(2) at the transmogrification of the fanatic Virago into a modern +novel-pawing proselyte of the Age of Reason--a Tom Paine in +petticoats; (3) at the utter want of all rhythm in the verse, the +monotony and dead plumb-down of the pauses, and at the absence of all +bone, muscle, and sinew in the single lines." + +In September Coleridge returned to Cambridge, to keep what turned out +to be his last term at Jesus. We may fairly suppose that he had already +made up his mind to bid adieu to the Alma Mater whose bosom he was +about to quit for that of a more venerable and, as he then believed, a +gentler mother on the banks of the Susquehanna; but it is not +impossible that in any case his departure might have been expedited by +the remonstrances of college authority. Dr. Pearce, Master of Jesus, +and afterwards Dean of Ely, did all he could, records a friend of a +somewhat later date, "to keep him within bounds; but his repeated +efforts to reclaim him were to no purpose, and upon one occasion, after +a long discussion on the visionary and ruinous tendency of his later +schemes, Coleridge cut short the argument by bluntly assuring him, his +friend and master, that he mistook the matter altogether. He was +neither Jacobin, [8] he said, nor Democrat, but a Pantisocrat." And, +leaving the good doctor to digest this new and strange epithet, +Coleridge bade farewell to his college and his university, and went +forth into that world with which he was to wage so painful and variable +a struggle. + + +FOOTNOTES + +1. He tells us in the _Biographia Literaria_ that he had +translated the eight hymns of Synesius from the Greek into English +anacreontics "before his fifteenth year." It is reasonable to suppose, +therefore, that he had more scholarship in 1782 than most boys of ten +years. + +2. Footnote: Gillman, pp. 22, 23. + +3. Of this Coleridge afterwards remarked with justice that its "ideas +were better than the language or metre in which they were conveyed." +Porson, with little magnanimity, as De Quincey complains, was severe +upon its Greek, but its main conception--an appeal to Death to come, a +welcome deliverer to the slaves, and to bear them to shores where "they +may tell their beloved ones what horrors they, being men, had endured +from men"--is moving and effective. De Quincey, however, was +undoubtedly right in his opinion that Coleridge's Greek scholarship was +not of the exact order. No exact scholar could, for instance, have died +in the faith (as Coleridge did) that [Greek Text: epsilon-sigma-tau-eta- +sigma-epsilon] (S. T. C.) means "he stood," and not "he placed." + +4. Adding "that which gained the prize was contemptible"--an +expression of opinion hardly in accordance with Le Grice's statement +("Recollections" in _Gentleman's Magazine_ for 1836) that "no one +was more convinced of the propriety of the decision than Coleridge +himself." Mr. Le Grice, however, bears valuable testimony to +Coleridge's disappointment, though I think he exaggerates its influence +in determining his career. + +5. It is characteristic of the punctilious inaccuracy of Mr. Cottle +(_Recollections_, ii. 54) that he should insist that the assumed +name was "Cumberbatch, not Comberback," though Coleridge has himself +fixed the real name by the jest, "My habits were so little equestrian, +that my horse, I doubt not, was of that opinion." This circumstance, +though trifling, does not predispose us to accept unquestioningly Mr. +Cottle's highly particularised account of Coleridge's experience with +his regiment. + +6. Miss Mitford, in her _Recollections of a Literary Life_, +interestingly records the active share taken by her father in +procuring the learned trooper's discharge. + +7. "In omni adversitate fortunae, infelicissimum genus est infortunii +fuisse felicem."--_Boethius_. + +8. Carrlyon's _Early Years and late Reflections_, vol. i. p. 27. + + + + +CHAPTER II. + +The Bristol Lectures--Marriage--Life at Clevedon--The _Watchman_-- +Retirement to Stowey--Introduction to Wordsworth. + +[1794-1797.] + + +The reflections of the worthy Master of Jesus upon the strange reply of +the wayward young undergraduate would have been involved in even +greater perplexity if he could have looked forward a few months into +the future. For after a winter spent in London, and enlivened by those +_noctes conoque Deum_ at the "Cat and Salutation," which Lamb has +so charmingly recorded, Coleridge returned with Southey to Bristol at +the beginning of 1795, and there proceeded to deliver a series of +lectures which, whatever their other merits, would certainly not have +assisted Dr. Pearce to grasp the distinction between a Pantisocrat and +a Jacobin. As a scholar and a man of literary taste he might possibly +have admired the rhetorical force of the following outburst, but, +considering that the "HE" here gibbeted in capitals was no less a +personage than the "heaven-born minister" himself, a plain man might +well have wondered what additional force the vocabulary of Jacobinism +could have infused into the language of Pantisocracy. After summing up +the crimes of the Reign of Terror the lecturer asks: "Who, my brethren, +was the cause of this guilt if not HE who supplied the occasion and the +motive? Heaven hath bestowed on _that man_ a portion of its +ubiquity, and given him an actual presence in the sacraments of hell, +wherever administered, in all the bread of bitterness, in all the cups +of blood." And in general, indeed, the _Conciones ad Populum_, as +Coleridge named these lectures on their subsequent publication, were +rather calculated to bewilder any of the youthful lecturer's well- +wishers who might be anxious for some means of discriminating his +attitude from that of the Hardys, the Horne Tookes, and the Thelwalls +of the day. A little warmth of language might no doubt be allowed to a +young friend of liberty in discussing legislation which, in the +retrospect, has staggered even so staunch a Tory as Sir Archibald +Alison; but Coleridge's denunciation of the Pitt and Grenville Acts, in +the lecture entitled _The Plot Discovered_, is occasionally +startling, even for that day of fierce passions, in the fierceness of +its language. It is interesting, however, to note the ever-active play +of thought and reasoning amid the very storm and stress of political +passion. Coleridge is never for long together a mere declaimer on +popular rights and ministerial tyranny, and even this indignant address +contains a passage of extremely just and thoughtful analysis of the +constituent elements of despotism. Throughout the spring and summer of +1795 Coleridge continued his lectures at Bristol, his head still +simmering--though less violently, it may be suspected, every month-- +with Pantisocracy, and certainly with all his kindred political and +religious enthusiasms unabated. + +A study of these crude but vigorous addresses reveals to us, as does +the earlier of the early poems, a mind struggling with its half-formed +and ever-changing conceptions of the world, and, as is usual at such +peculiar phases of an intellectual development, affirming its temporary +beliefs with a fervour and vehemence directly proportioned to the +recency of their birth. Commenting on the _Conciones ad Populum_ +many years afterwards, and invoking them as witnesses to his political +consistency as an author, Coleridge remarked that with the exception of +"two or three pages involving the doctrine of philosophical necessity +and Unitarianism," he saw little or nothing in these outbursts of his +youthful zeal to retract, and, with the exception of "some flame- +coloured epithets" applied to persons, as to Mr. Pitt and others, "or +rather to personifications"--for such, he says, they really were to +him--as little to regret. + +We now, however, arrive at an event, important in the life of every +man, and which influenced that of Coleridge to an extent not the less +certainly extraordinary because difficult, if not impossible, to define +with exactitude. On the 4th of October 1795 Coleridge was married at +St. Mary Redcliffe Church, Bristol, to Sarah (or as he preferred to +spell it Sara) Fricker, and withdrew for a time from the eager +intellectual life of a political lecturer to the contemplative quiet +appropriate to the honeymoon of a poet, spent in a sequestered cottage +amid beautiful scenery, and within sound of the sea. No wonder that +among such surroundings, and with such belongings, the honeymoon should +have extended from one month to three, and indeed that Coleridge should +have waited till his youthful yearnings for a life of action, and +perhaps (though that would have lent itself less gracefully to his poem +of farewell to his Clevedon cottage) his increasing sense of the +necessity of supplementing the ambrosia of love with the bread and +cheese of mortals, compelled him to re-enter the world. No wonder he +should have delayed to do so, for it is as easy to perceive in his +poems that these were days of unclouded happiness as it is melancholy +to reflect by how few others like them his life was destined to be +brightened. The _Aeolian Harp_ has no more than the moderate +merits, with its full share of the characteristic faults, of his +earlier productions; but one cannot help "reading into it" the poet's +after-life of disappointment and disillusion--estrangement from the +"beloved woman" in whose affection he was then reposing; decay and +disappearance of those "flitting phantasies" with which he was then so +joyously trifling, and the bitterly ironical scholia which fate was +preparing for such lines as + + "And tranquil muse upon tranquillity." + +One cannot in fact refrain from mentally comparing the _'olian +Harp_ of 1795 with the _Dejection_ of 1803, and no one who has +thoroughly felt the spirit of both poems can make that comparison +without emotion. The former piece is not, as has been said, in a +literary sense remarkable. With the exception of the one point of +metrical style, to be touched on presently, it has almost no note of +poetic distinction save such as belongs of right to any simple record +of a mood which itself forms the highest poetry of the average man's +life; and one well knows whence came the criticism of that MS. note +inscribed by S. T. C. in a copy of the second edition of his early +poems, "This I think the most perfect poem I ever wrote. Bad may be the +best perhaps." One feels that the annotator might just as well have +written, "How perfect was the happiness which this poem recalls!" for +this is really all that Coleridge's eulogium, with its touching bias +from the hand of memory, amounts to. + +It has become time, however, to speak more generally of Coleridge's +early poems. The peaceful winter months of 1795-96 were in all +likelihood spent in arranging and revising the products of those poetic +impulses which had more or less actively stirred within him from his +seventeenth year upwards; and in April 1797 there appeared at Bristol a +volume of some fifty pieces entitled _Poems on Various Subjects, by +S. T. Coleridge, late of Jesus College Cambridge_. It was published +by his friend Cottle, who, in a mixture of the generous with the +speculative instinct, had given him thirty guineas for the copyright. +Its contents are of a miscellaneous kind, consisting partly of rhymed +irregular odes, partly of a collection of _Sonnets on Eminent +Characters_, and partly (and principally) of a blank verse poem of +several hundred lines, then, and indeed for years afterwards, regarded +by many of the poet's admirers as his masterpiece--the _Religious +Musings_. [1] + +To the second edition of these poems, which was published in the +following year, Coleridge, at all times a candid critic (to the limited +extent to which it is possible even for the finest judges to be so) of +his own works, prefixed a preface, wherein he remarks that his poems +have been "rightly charged with a profusion of double epithets and a +general turgidness," and adds that he has "pruned the double epithets +with no sparing hand," and used his best efforts to tame the swell and +glitter both of thought and diction. "The latter fault, however, had," +he continues, "so insinuated itself into my _Religious Musings_ +with such intricacy of union that sometimes I have omitted to +disentangle the weed from fear of snapping the flower." This is plain- +spoken criticism, but I do not think that any reader who is competent +to pronounce judgment on the point will be inclined to deprecate its +severity. Nay, in order to get done with fault-finding as soon as +possible, it must perhaps be added that the admitted turgidness of the +poems is often something more than a mere defect of style, and that the +verse is turgid because the feeling which it expresses is exaggerated. +The "youthful bard unknown to fame" who, in the _Songs of the +Pixies_, is made to "heave the gentle misery of a sigh," is only +doing a natural thing described in ludicrously and unnaturally stilted +terms; but the young admirer of the _Robbers_, who informs +Schiller that if he were to meet him in the evening wandering in his +loftier mood "beneath some vast old tempest-swinging wood," he would +"gaze upon him awhile in mute awe" and then "weep aloud in a wild +ecstasy," endangers the reader's gravity not so much by extravagance of +diction as by over-effusiveness of sentiment. The former of these two +offences differs from the latter by the difference between "fustian" +and "gush." And there is, in fact, more frequent exception to be taken +to the character of the thought in these poems than to that of the +style. The remarkable gift of eloquence, which seems to have belonged +to Coleridge from boyhood, tended naturally to aggravate that very +common fault of young poets whose faculty of expression has outstripped +the growth of their intellectual and emotional experiences--the fault +of wordiness. Page after page of the poems of 1796 is filled with what +one cannot, on the most favourable terms, rank higher than rhetorical +commonplace; stanza after stanza falls pleasantly upon the ear without +suggesting any image sufficiently striking to arrest the eye of the +imagination, or awakening any thought sufficiently novel to lay hold +upon the mind. The _Aeolian Harp_ has been already referred to as a +pleasing poem, and reading it, as we must, in constant recollection of +the circumstances in which it was written, it unquestionably is so. But +in none of the descriptions either of external objects or of internal +feeling which are to be found in this and its companion piece, the +_Reflections on having left a Place of Retirement_, is there +anything which can fairly be said to elevate them above the level of +graceful verse. It is only in the region of the fantastic and +supernatural that Coleridge's imagination, as he was destined to show +by a far more splendid example two years afterwards, seems to acquire +true poetic distinction. It is in the _Songs of the Pixies_ that +the young man "heaves the gentle misery of a sigh," and the sympathetic +interest of the reader of today is chilled by the too frequent +intrusion of certain abstract ladies, each preceded by her capital +letter and attended by her "adjective-in-waiting;" but, after all +deductions for the conventionalisms of "white-robed Purity," "meek-eyed +Pity," "graceful Ease," etc., one cannot but feel that the _Songs of +the Pixies_ was the offspring not of a mere abundant and picturesque +vocabulary but of a true poetic fancy. It is worth far more as an +earnest of future achievement than the very unequal _Monody on the +Death of Chatterton_ (for which indeed we ought to make special +allowance, as having been commenced in the author's eighteenth year), +and certainly than anything which could be quoted from the +_Effusions_, as Coleridge, unwilling to challenge comparison with +the divine Bowles, had chosen to describe his sonnets. It must be +honestly said indeed that these are, a very few excepted, among the +least satisfactory productions of any period of his poetic career. The +Coleridgian sonnet is not only imperfect in form and in marked contrast +in the frequent bathos of its close to the steady swell and climax of +Wordsworth, but, in by far the majority of instances in this volume, it +is wanting in internal weight. The "single pebble" of thought which a +sonnet should enclose is not only not neatly wrapped up in its envelope +of words, but it is very often not heavy enough to carry itself and its +covering to the mark. When it is so, its weight, as in the sonnet to +Pitt, is too frequently only another word for an ephemeral violence of +political feeling which, whether displayed on one side or the other, +cannot be expected to reproduce its effect in the minds of +comparatively passionless posterity. Extravagances, too, abound, as +when in _Kosciusko_ Freedom is made to look as if, in a fit of +"wilfulness and sick despair," she had drained a mystic urn containing +all the tears that had ever found "fit channel on a Patriot's furrowed +cheek." The main difficulty of the metre, too--that of avoiding forced +rhymes--is rarely surmounted. Even in the three fine lines in the +_Burke_--- + + "Thee stormy Pity and the cherished lure + Of Pomp and proud precipitance of soul, + Wildered with meteor fires"-- + +we cannot help feeling that "lure" is extremely harsh, while the +weakness of the two concluding lines of the sonnet supplies a typical +example of the disappointment which these "effusions" so often prepare +for their readers. + +Enough, however, has been said of the faults of these early poems; it +remains to consider their merits, foremost among which, as might be +expected, is the wealth and splendour of their diction in these +passages, in which such display is all that is needed for the literary +ends of the moment. Over all that wide region of literature, in which +force and fervour of utterance, depth and sincerity of feeling avail, +without the nameless magic of poetry in the higher sense of the word, +to achieve the objects of the writer and to satisfy the mind of the +reader, Coleridge ranges with a free and sure footstep. It is no +disparagement to his _Religious Musings_ to say that it is to this +class of literature that it belongs. Having said this, however, it must +be added that poetry of the second order has seldom risen to higher +heights of power. The faults already admitted disfigure it here and +there. We have "moon blasted Madness when he yells at midnight;" we +read of "eye-starting wretches and rapture-trembling seraphim," and the +really striking image of Ruin, the "old hag, unconquerable, huge, +Creation's eyeless drudge," is marred by making her "nurse" an +"impatient earthquake." But there is that in Coleridge's aspirations +and apostrophes to the Deity which impresses one even more profoundly +than the mere magnificence, remarkable as it is, of their rhetorical +clothing. They are touched with so penetrating a sincerity; they are so +obviously the outpourings of an awe-struck heart. Indeed, there is +nothing more remarkable at this stage of Coleridge's poetic development +than the instant elevation which his verse assumes whenever he passes +to Divine things. At once it seems to take on a Miltonic majesty of +diction and a Miltonic stateliness of rhythm. The tender but low-lying +domestic sentiment of the _Aeolian Harp_ is in a moment informed by +it with the dignity which marks that poem's close. Apart too from its +literary merits, the biographical interest of _Religious Musings_ +is very considerable. "Written," as its title declares, but in reality, +as its length would suggest and as Mr. Cottle in fact tells us, only +_completed_, "on the Christmas eve of 1794," it gives expression +to the tumultuous emotions by which Coleridge's mind was agitated at +this its period of highest political excitement. His revolutionary +enthusiasm was now at its hottest, his belief in the infant French +Republic at its fullest, his wrath against the "coalesced kings" at its +fiercest, his contempt for their religious pretence at its bitterest. +"Thee to defend," he cries, + + "Thee to defend, dear Saviour of mankind! + Thee, Lamb of God! Thee, blameless Prince of Peace! + From all sides rush the thirsty brood of war-- + Austria, and that foul Woman of the North, + The lustful murderess of her wedded lord, + And he, connatural mind! whom (in their songs, + So bards of elder time had haply feigned) + Some Fury fondled in her hate to man, + Bidding her serpent hair in tortuous fold + Lick his young face, and at his mouth imbreathe + Horrible sympathy!" + +This is vigorous poetic invective; and the effect of such outbursts is +heightened by the rapid subsidence of the passion that inspires them +and the quick advent of a calmer mood. We have hardly turned the page +ere denunciations of Catherine and Frederick William give place to +prayerful invocations of the Supreme Being, which are in their turn the +prelude of a long and beautiful contemplative passage: "In the prim'val +age, a dateless while," etc., on the pastoral origin of human society. +It is as though some sweet and solemn strain of organ music had +succeeded to the blast of war-bugles and the roll of drums. In the +_Ode to the Departing Year_, written in the last days of 1796, +with its "prophecy of curses though I pray fervently for blessings" +upon the poet's native country, the mood is more uniform in its gloom; +and it lacks something, therefore, of those peculiar qualities which +make the _Religious Musings_ one perhaps of the most pleasing of +all Coleridge's earlier productions. But it shares with the poems +shortly to be noticed what may be called the autobiographic charm. The +fresh natural emotion of a young and brilliant mind is eternally +interesting, and Coleridge's youthful Muse, with a frankness of self- +disclosure which is not the less winning because at times it provokes a +smile, confides to us even the history of her most temporary moods. It +is, for instance, at once amusing and captivating to read in the latest +edition of the poems, as a footnote to the lines-- + + "Not yet enslaved, not wholly vile, + O Albion! O my mother isle!" + +the words-- + + "O doomed to fall, enslaved and vile--1796." + +Yes; in 1796 and till the end of 1797 the poet's native country +_was_ in his opinion all these dreadful things, but, directly the +mood changes, the verse alters, and to the advantage, one cannot but +think, of the beautiful and often-quoted close of the passage-- + +"And Ocean mid his uproar wild + Speaks safety to his island child. + Hence for many a fearless age + Has social Quiet loved thy shore, + Nor ever proud invader's rage, + Or sacked thy towers or stained thy fields with gore." + +And whether we view him in his earlier or his later mood there is a +certain strange dignity of utterance, a singular confidence in his own +poetic mission, which forbids us to smile at this prophet of four-and- +twenty who could thus conclude his menacing vaticinations:-- + + "Away, my soul, away! + I, unpartaking of the evil thing, + With daily prayer and daily toil + Soliciting for food my scanty soil, + Have wailed my country with a loud lament. + Now I recentre my immortal mind + In the deep Sabbath of meek self-content, + Cleansed from the vaporous passions which bedim + God's image, sister of the Seraphim." + +If ever the consciousness of great powers and the assurance of a great +future inspired a youth with perfect and on the whole well-warranted +fearlessness of ridicule it has surely done so here. + +Poetry alone, however, formed no sufficient outlet for Coleridge's +still fresh political enthusiasm--an enthusiasm which now became too +importunate to let him rest in his quiet Clevedon cottage. Was it +right, he cries in his lines of leave-taking to his home, that he +should dream away the entrusted hours "while his unnumbered brethren +toiled and bled"? The propaganda of Liberty was to be pushed forward; +the principles of Unitarianism, to which Coleridge had become a convert +at Cambridge, were to be preached. Is it too prosaic to add that what +poor Henri Murger calls the "chasse aux piece de cent sous" was in all +probability demanding peremptorily to be resumed? + +Anyhow it so fell out that in the spring of the year 1796 Coleridge +took his first singular plunge into the unquiet waters of journalism, +instigated thereto by "sundry philanthropists and anti-polemists," +whose names he does not record, but among whom we may conjecturally +place Mr. Thomas Poole of Stowey, with whom he had formed what was +destined to be one of the longest and closest friendships of his life. +Which of the two parties--the advisers or the advised--was responsible +for the general plan of this periodical and for the arrangements for +its publication is unknown; but one of these last-mentioned details is +enough to indicate that there could have been no "business head" among +them. Considering that the motto of the _Watchman_ declared the +object of its issue to be that "all might know the truth, and that the +truth might make them free," it is to be presumed that the promoters of +the scheme were not unwilling to secure as many subscribers as possible +for their sheet of "thirty-two pages, large octavo, closely printed, +price only fourpence." In order, however, to exempt it from the stamp- +tax, and with the much less practical object of making it "contribute +as little as possible to the supposed guilt of a war against freedom," +it was to be published on every eighth day, so that the week-day of its +appearance would of course vary with each successive week--an +arrangement as ingeniously calculated to irritate and alienate its +public as any perhaps that the wit of man could have devised. So, +however, it was to be, and accordingly with "a naming prospectus, +'Knowledge is Power,' to cry the state of the political atmosphere," +Coleridge set off on a tour to the north, from Bristol to Sheffield, +for the purpose of procuring customers, preaching Unitarian sermons by +the way in most of the great towns, "as an hireless volunteer in a blue +coat and white waistcoat that not a rag of the woman of Babylon might +be seen on me." How he sped upon his mission is related by him with +infinite humour in the _Biographia Literaria_. He opened the +campaign at Birmingham upon a Calvinist tallow-chandler, who, after +listening to half an hour's harangue, extending from "the captivity of +the nations" to "the near approach of the millennium," and winding up +with a quotation describing the latter "glorious state" out of the +_Religious Musings_, inquired what might be the cost of the new +publication. Deeply sensible of "the anti-climax, the abysmal bathos" +of the answer, Coleridge replied, "Only fourpence, each number to be +published every eighth day," upon which the tallow-chandler observed +doubtfully that that came to "a deal of money at the end of the year." +What determined him, however, to withhold his patronage was not the +price of the article but its quantity, and not the deficiency of that +quantity but its excess. Thirty-two pages, he pointed out, was more +than he ever read all the year round, and though "as great a one as any +man in Brummagem for liberty and truth, and them sort of things, he +begged to be excused." Had it been possible to arrange for supplying +him with sixteen pages of the paper for twopence, a bargain might no +doubt have been struck; but he evidently had a business-like repugnance +to anything in the nature of "over-trading." Equally unsuccessful was a +second application made at Manchester to a "stately and opulent +wholesale dealer in cottons," who thrust the prospectus into his pocket +and turned his back upon the projector, muttering that he was "overrun +with these articles." This, however, was Coleridge's last attempt at +canvassing. His friends at Birmingham persuaded him to leave that work +to others, their advice being no doubt prompted, in part at least, by +the ludicrous experience of his qualifications as a canvasser which the +following incident furnished them. The same tradesman who had +introduced him to the patriotic tallow-chandler entertained him at +dinner, and, after the meal, invited his guest to smoke a pipe with him +and "two or three other _illuminati_ of the same rank." The +invitation was at first declined on the plea of an engagement to spend +the evening with a minister and his friends, and also because, writes +Coleridge, "I had never smoked except once or twice in my lifetime, and +then it was herb-tobacco mixed with Oronooko." His host, however, +assured him that the tobacco was equally mild, and "seeing, too, that +it was of a yellow colour," he took half a pipe of it, "filling the +lower half of the bowl," for some unexplained reason, "with salt." He +was soon, however, compelled to resign it "in consequence of a +giddiness and distressful feeling" in his eyes, which, as he had drunk +but a single glass of ale, he knew must have been the effect of the +tobacco. Deeming himself recovered after a short interval, he sallied +forth to fulfil the evening's engagement; but the symptoms returned +with the walk and the fresh air, and he had scarcely entered the +minister's drawing-room and opened a packet of letters awaiting him +there than he "sank back on the sofa in a sort of swoon rather than +sleep." Fortunately he had had time to inform his new host of the +confused state of his feelings and of its occasion; for "here and thus +I lay," he continues, "my face like a wall that is whitewashing, +deathly pale, and with the cold drops of perspiration running down it +from my forehead; while one after another there dropped in the +different gentlemen who had been invited to meet and spend the evening +with me, to the number of from fifteen to twenty. As the poison of +tobacco acts but for a short time, I at length awoke from insensibility +and looked round on the party, my eyes dazzled by the candles, which +had been lighted in the interim. By way of relieving my embarrassment +one of the gentlemen began the conversation with: 'Have you seen a +paper to-day, Mr. Coleridge?' 'Sir,' I replied, rubbing my eyes, 'I am +far from convinced that a Christian is permitted to read either +newspapers or any other works of merely political and temporary +interest.'" The incongruity of this remark, with the purpose for which +the speaker was known to have visited Birmingham, and to assist him in +which the company had assembled, produced, as was natural, "an +involuntary and general burst of laughter," and the party spent, we are +told, a most delightful evening. Both then and afterwards, however, +they all joined in dissuading the young projector from proceeding with +his scheme, assuring him "in the most friendly and yet most flattering +expressions" that the employment was neither fit for him nor he for the +employment. They insisted that at any rate "he should make no more +applications in person, but carry on the canvass by proxy," a +stipulation which we may well believe to have been prompted as much by +policy as by good nature. The same hospitable reception, the same +dissuasion, and, that failing, the same kind exertions on his behalf, +he met with at Manchester, Derby, Nottingham, and every other place he +visited; and the result of his tour was that he returned with nearly a +thousand names on the subscription list of the _Watchman_, +together with "something more than a half conviction that prudence +dictated the abandonment of the scheme." Nothing but this, however, was +needed to induce him to persevere with it. To know that a given course +of conduct was the dictate of prudence was a sort of presumptive proof +to him at this period of life that the contrary was the dictate of +duty. In due time, or rather out of due time,--for the publication of +the first number was delayed beyond the day announced for it,--the +_Watchman_ appeared. Its career was brief--briefer, indeed, than +it need have been. A naturally short life was suicidally shortened. In +the second number, records Coleridge, with delightful _naivete_, +"an essay against fast-days, with a most censurable application of a +text from Isaiah [2] for its motto, lost me near five hundred +subscribers at one blow." In the two following numbers he made enemies +of all his Jacobin and democratic patrons by playing Balaam to the +legislation of the Government, and pronouncing something almost like a +blessing on the "gagging bills"--measures he declared which, "whatever +the motive of their introduction, would produce an effect to be desired +by all true friends of freedom, as far as they should contribute to +deter men from openly declaiming on subjects the principles of which +they had never bottomed, and from pleading to the poor and ignorant +instead of pleading for them." At the same time the editor of the +_Watchman_ avowed his conviction that national education and a +concurring spread of the Gospel were the indispensable conditions of +any true political amelioration. We can hardly wonder on the whole that +by the time the seventh number was published its predecessors were +being "exposed in sundry old iron shops at a penny a piece." + +And yet, like everything which came from Coleridge's hand, this +immature and unpractical production has an interest of its own. Amid +the curious mixture of actuality and abstract disquisition of which +each number of the _Watchman_ is made up, we are arrested again +and again by some striking metaphor or some weighty sentence which +tells us that the writer is no mere wordy wielder of a facile pen. The +paper on the slave trade in the seventh number is a vigorous and, in +places, a heart-stirring appeal to the humane emotions. There are +passages in it which foreshadow Coleridge's more mature literary +manner--the manner of the great pulpit orators of the seventeenth +century--in a very interesting way. [3] But what was the use of No. IV +containing an effective article like this when No. III. had opened with +an "Historical Sketch of the Manners and Religion of the Ancient +Germans, introductory to a sketch of the Manners, Religion, and +Politics of present Germany"? This to a public who wanted to read about +Napoleon and Mr. Pitt! No. III. in all probability "choked off" a good +proportion of the commonplace readers who might have been well content +to have put up with the humanitarian rhetoric of No. IV., if only for its +connection with so unquestionable an actuality as West Indian sugar. It +was, anyhow, owing to successive alienations of this kind that on +13th May 1796 the editor of the _Watchman_ was compelled to bid +farewell to his few remaining readers in the tenth number of his +periodical, for the "short and satisfactory" reason that "the work does +not pay its expenses." "Part of my readers," continues Coleridge, +"relinquished it because it did not contain sufficient original +composition, and a still larger part because it contained too much;" +and he then proceeds with that half-humorous simplicity of his to +explain what excellent reasons there were why the first of these +classes should transfer their patronage to Flower's _Cambridge +Intelligencer_, and the second theirs to the _New Monthly +Magazine_. + +It is not, however, for the biographer or the world to regret the short +career of the _Watchman_, since its decease left Coleridge's mind +in undivided allegiance to the poetic impulse at what was destined to +be the period of its greatest power. In the meantime one result of the +episode had been to make a not unimportant addition to his friendships. +Mention has already been made of his somewhat earlier acquaintance with +Mr. Thomas Poole of Nether Stowey, a man of high intelligence and mark +in his time; and it was in the course of his northern peregrinations in +search of subscribers that he met with Charles Lloyd. This young man, +the son of an eminent Birmingham banker, was so struck with Coleridge's +genius and eloquence as to conceive an "ardent desire to domesticate +himself permanently with a man whose conversation was to him as a +revelation from heaven;" and shortly after the decease of the +_Watchman_ he obtained his parents' consent to the arrangement. + +Early, therefore, in the year 1797 Coleridge, accompanied by Charles +Lloyd, removed to Nether Stowey in Somersetshire, where he occupied a +cottage placed at his disposal by Mr. Poole. His first employment in +his new abode appears to have been the preparation of the second +edition of his poems. In the new issue nineteen pieces of the former +publication were discarded and twelve new ones added, the most +important of which was the _Ode to the Departing Year_, which had +first appeared in the _Cambridge Intelligencer_, and had been +immediately afterwards republished in a separate form as a thin quarto +pamphlet, together with some lines of no special merit "addressed to a +young man of fortune" (probably Charles Lloyd), "who abandoned himself +to an indolent and causeless melancholy." To the new edition were added +the preface already quoted from, and a prose introduction to the +sonnets. The volume also contained some poems by Charles Lloyd and an +enlarged collection of sonnets and other pieces by Charles Lamb, the +latter of whom about the time of its publication paid his first visit +to the friend with whom, ever since leaving Christ's Hospital, he had +kept up a constant and, to the student of literature, a most +interesting correspondence. [4] In June 1797 Charles and Mary Lamb +arrived at the Stowey cottage to find their host disabled by an +accident which prevented him from walking during their whole stay. It +was during their absence on a walking expedition that he composed the +pleasing lines-- + + "The lime-tree bower my prison," + +in which he thrice applies to his friend that epithet which gave such +humorous annoyance to the "gentle-hearted Charles." [5] + +But a greater than Lamb, if one may so speak without offence to the +votaries of that rare humorist and exquisite critic, had already made +his appearance on the scene. Some time before this visit of Lamb's to +Stowey Coleridge had made the acquaintance of the remarkable man who +was destined to influence his literary career in many ways importantly, +and in one way decisively. It was in the month of June 1797, and at the +village of Racedown in Dorsetshire, that he first met William +Wordsworth. + + +FOOTNOTES + +1. The volume contained also three sonnets by Charles Lamb, one of +which was destined to have a somewhat curious history. + +2. "Wherefore my bowels shall sound like an harp."--Is. xvi. 11. + +3. Take for instance this sentence: "Our own sorrows, like the Princes +of Hell in Milton's Pandemonium, sit enthroned 'bulky and vast;' while +the miseries of our fellow-creatures dwindle into pigmy forms, and are +crowded in an innumerable multitude into some dark corner of the +heart." Both in character of imagery and in form of structure we have +here the germ of such passages as this which one might confidently defy +the most accomplished literary "taster" to distinguish from Jeremy +Taylor: "Or like two rapid streams that at their first meeting within +narrow and rocky banks mutually strive to repel each other, and +intermix reluctantly and in tumult, but soon finding a wider channel +and more yielding shores, blend and dilate and flow on in one current +and with one voice."--_Biog. Lit._ p. 155. + +4. Perhaps a "correspondence" of which only one side exists may be +hardly thought to deserve that name. Lamb's letters to Coleridge are +full of valuable criticism on their respective poetical efforts. +Unfortunately in, it is somewhat strangely said, "a fit of dejection" +he destroyed all Coleridge's letters to him. + +5. Lamb's Correspondence with Coleridge, Letter XXXVII. + + + + +CHAPTER III. + +Coleridge and Wordsworth--Publication of the _Lyrical +Ballads_--The _Ancient Mariner_--The first part of +_Christabel_--Decline of Coleridge's poetic impulse- +Final review of his poetry. + +[1797-1799.] + + +The years 1797 and 1798 are generally and justly regarded as the +blossoming-time of Coleridge's poetic genius. It would be scarcely an +exaggeration to say that they were even more than this, and that within +the brief period covered by them is included not only the development +of the poet's powers to their full maturity but the untimely beginnings +of their decline. For to pass from the poems written by Coleridge +within these two years to those of later origin is like passing from +among the green wealth of summer foliage into the well-nigh naked woods +of later autumn. During 1797 and 1798 the _Ancient Mariner_, the +first part of _Christabel_, the fine ode to France, the _Fears +in Solitude_, the beautiful lines entitled _Frost at Midnight_, +the _Nightingale_, the _Circassian Love-Chant_, the piece known +as _Love_ from the poem of the _Dark Ladie_, and that strange +fragment _Kubla Khan_, were all of them written and nearly all +of them published; while between the last composed of these and +that swan-song of his dying Muse, the _Dejection_, of 1802, there +is but one piece to be added to the list of his greater works. This +therefore, the second part of _Christabel_ (1800), may almost be +described by the picturesque image in the first part of the same poem +as + + "The one red leaf, the last of its clan, + Hanging so light and hanging so high, + On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky." + +The first to fail him of his sources of inspiration was his +revolutionary enthusiasm; and the ode to France--the _Recantation_, +as it was styled on its first appearance in the _Morning Post_--is the +record of a reaction which, as has been said, was as much speedier in +Coleridge's case than in that of the other ardent young minds which had +come under the spell of the Revolution as his enthusiasm had been more +passionate than theirs. In the winter of 1797-98 the Directory had +plunged France into an unnatural conflict with her sister Republic of +Switzerland, and Coleridge, who could pardon and had pardoned her +fierce animosity against a country which he considered not so much his +own as Pitt's, was unable to forgive her this. In the _Recantation_ +he casts her off for ever; he perceives at last that true liberty is not +to be obtained through political, but only through spiritual emancipation; +that-- + + "The sensual and the dark rebel in vain, + Slaves by their own compulsion! In mad game + They burst their manacles, and wear the name + Of Freedom graven on a heavier chain"; + +and arrives in a noble peroration at the somewhat unsatisfactory +conclusion, that the spirit of liberty, "the guide of homeless winds +and playmate of the waves," is to be found only among the elements, and +not in the institutions of man. And in the same quaintly ingenuous +spirit which half touches and half amuses us in his earlier poems he +lets us perceive a few weeks later, in his _Fears in Solitude_, +that sympathy with a foreign nation threatened by the invader may +gradually develop into an almost filial regard for one's own similarly +situated land. He has been deemed, he says, an enemy of his country. + + "But, O dear Britain! O my mother Isle," + +once, it may be remembered, "doomed to fall enslaved and vile," but +now-- + + "Needs must them prove a name most dear and holy, + To me a son, a brother, and a friend, + A husband and a father! who revere + All bonds of natural love, and find them all + Within the limits of thy rocky shores." + +After all, it has occurred to him, England is not only the England of +Pitt and Grenville, and in that capacity the fitting prey of the +insulted French Republic: she is also the England of Sara Coleridge, +and little Hartley, and of Mr. Thomas Poole of Nether Stowey. And so, +to be sure, she was in 1796 when her downfall was predicted, and in the +spirit rather of the Old Testament than of the New. But there is +something very engaging in the candour with which the young poet +hastens to apprise us of this his first awakening to the fact. + +_France_ may be regarded as the last ode, and _Fears in +Solitude_ as the last blank-verse poem of any importance, that owe +their origin to Coleridge's early political sentiments. Henceforth, and +for the too brief period of his poetic activity, he was to derive his +inspiration from other sources. The most fruitful and important of +these was unquestionably his intercourse with Wordsworth, from whom, +although there was doubtless a reciprocation of influence between +them, his much more receptive nature took a far deeper impression than +it made. [1] At the time of their meeting he had already for some three +years been acquainted with Wordsworth's works as a poet, and it speaks +highly for his discrimination that he was able to discern the great +powers of his future friend, even in work so immature in many respects +as the _Descriptive Sketches_. It was during the last year of his +residence at Cambridge that he first met with these poems, of which he +says in the _Biographia Literaria_ that "seldom, if ever, was the +emergence of an original poetic genius above the literary horizon more +evidently announced;" and the effect produced by this volume was +steadily enhanced by further acquaintance both with the poet and his +works. Nothing, indeed, is so honourably noticeable and even touching +in Coleridge's relation to his friend as the tone of reverence with +which, even in the days of his highest self-confidence and even almost +haughty belief in the greatness of his own poetic mission, he was +accustomed to speak of Wordsworth. A witness, to be more fully cited +hereafter, and whose testimony is especially valuable as that of one +who was by no means blind to Coleridge's early foible of self- +complacency, has testified to this unbounded admiration of his brother- +poet. "When," records this gentleman, "we have sometimes spoken +complimentarily to Coleridge of himself he has said that he was nothing +in comparison with Wordsworth." And two years before this, at a time +when they had not yet tested each other's power in literary +collaboration, he had written to Cottle to inform him of his +introduction to the author of "near twelve hundred lines of blank +verse, superior, I dare aver, to anything in our language which in any +way resembles it," and had declared with evident sincerity that he felt +"a little man" by Wordsworth's side. + +His own impression upon his new friend was more distinctively personal +in its origin. It was by Coleridge's total individuality, by the sum of +his vast and varied intellectual powers, rather than by the specific +poetic element contained in them, that Wordsworth, like the rest of the +world indeed, was in the main attracted; but it is clear enough that +this attraction was from the first most powerful. On that point we have +not only the weighty testimony of Dorothy Wordsworth, as conveyed in +her often-quoted description [2] of her brother's new acquaintance, but +the still more conclusive evidence of her brother's own acts. He gave +the best possible proof of the fascination which had been exercised +over him by quitting Racedown with his sister for Alfoxden near Nether +Stowey within a few weeks of his first introduction to Coleridge, a +change of abode for which, as Miss Wordsworth has expressly recorded, +"our principal inducement was Coleridge's society." + +By a curious coincidence the two poets were at this time simultaneously +sickening for what may perhaps be appropriately called the "poetic +measles." They were each engaged in the composition of a five-act +tragedy, and read scenes to each other, and to each other's admiration, +from their respective dramas. Neither play was fortunate in its +immediate destiny. Wordsworth's tragedy, the _Borderers_, was +greatly commended by London critics and decisively rejected by the +management of Covent Garden. As for Coleridge, the negligent Sheridan +did not even condescend to acknowledge the receipt of his manuscript; +his play was passed from hand to hand among the Drury Lane Committee; +but not till many years afterwards did _Osorio_ find its way under +another name to the footlights. + +For the next twelvemonth the intercourse between the two poets was +close and constant, and most fruitful in results of high moment to +English literature. It was in their daily rambles among the Quantock +Hills that they excogitated that twofold theory of the essence and +functions of poetry which was to receive such notable illustration in +their joint volume of verse, the _Lyrical Ballads_; it was during +a walk over the Quantock Hills that by far the most famous poem of that +series, the _Ancient Mariner_, was conceived and in part composed. +The publication of the _Lyrical Ballads_ in the spring of the year +1798 was, indeed, an event of double significance for English poetry. +It marked an epoch in the creative life of Coleridge, and a no less +important one in the critical life of Wordsworth. In the _Biographia +Literaria_ the origination of the plan of the work is thus +described:-- + +"During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours our +conversation turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry, +the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful +adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest +of novelty by the modifying colours of the imagination. The sudden +charm which accidents of light and shade, which moonlight or sunset +diffused over a known and familiar landscape appeared to represent the +practicability of combining both. These are the poetry of nature. The +thought suggested itself (to which of us I do not recollect) that a +series of poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one the +incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural; and +the interest aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the +affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions as would naturally +accompany such situations, supposing them real.... For the second +class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life; the characters +and incidents were to be such as will be found in every village and its +vicinity where there is a meditative and feeling mind to seek after +them, or to notice them when they present themselves. In this idea +originated the plan of the _Lyrical Ballads_, in which it was +agreed that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters +supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our +inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to +procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of +disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith. Mr. +Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself, as his +object, to give the charm of novelty to things of everyday, and to +excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural by awakening the mind's +attention from the lethargy of custom and directing it to the +loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible +treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and +selfish solicitude, we have eyes which see not, ears that hear not, and +hearts which neither feel nor understand." + +We may measure the extent to which the poetic teaching and practice of +Wordsworth have influenced subsequent taste and criticism by noting how +completely the latter of these two functions of poetry has overshadowed +the former. To lend the charm of imagination to the real will appear to +many people to be not one function of poetry merely but its very +essence. To them it is poetry, and the only thing worthy of the name; +while the correlative function of lending the force of reality to the +imaginary will appear at best but a superior kind of metrical +romancing, or clever telling of fairy tales. Nor of course can there, +from the point of view of the highest conception of the poet's office, +be any comparison between the two. In so far as we regard poetry as +contributing not merely to the pleasure of the mind but to its health +and strength--in so far as we regard it in its capacity not only to +delight but to sustain, console, and tranquillise the human spirit-- +there is, of course, as much difference between the idealistic and the +realistic forms of poetry as there is between a narcotic potion and a +healing drug. The one, at best, can only enable a man to forget his +burdens; the other fortifies him to endure them. It is perhaps no more +than was naturally to be expected of our brooding and melancholy age, +that poetry (when it is not a mere voluptuous record of the subjective +impressions of sense) should have become almost limited in its very +meaning to the exposition of the imaginative or spiritual aspect of the +world of realities; but so it is now, and so in Coleridge's time it +clearly was _not_. Coleridge, in the passage above quoted, shows +no signs of regarding one of the two functions which he attributes to +poetry as any more accidental or occasional than the other; and the +fact that the realistic portion of the _Lyrical Ballads_ so far +exceeded in amount its supernatural element, he attributes not to any +inherent supremacy in the claims of the former to attention but simply +to the greater industry which Wordsworth had displayed in his special +department of the volume. For his own part, he says, "I wrote the +_Ancient Mariner_, and was preparing, among other poems, the +_Dark Ladie_ and the _Christabel_, in which I should have more +nearly realised my ideal than I had done in my first attempt. But +Mr. Wordsworth's industry had proved so much more successful, and the +number of the poems so much greater, that my compositions, instead of +forming a balance, appeared rather an interpolation of heterogeneous +matter." There was certainly a considerable disparity between the +amount of their respective contributions to the volume, which, in fact, +contained nineteen pieces by Wordsworth and only four by Coleridge. +Practically, indeed, we may reduce this four to one; for, of the three +others, the two scenes from _Osorio_ are without special distinction, +and the _Nightingale_, though a graceful poem, and containing +an admirably-studied description of the bird's note, is too +slight and short to claim any importance in the series. But the one +long poem which Coleridge contributed to the collection is alone +sufficient to associate it for ever with his name. _Unum sed +leonem._ To any one who should have taunted him with the comparative +infertility of his Muse he might well have returned the haughty answer +of the lioness in the fable, when he could point in justification of it +to the _Rime of the Ancient Marinere_. + +There is, I may assume, no need at the present day to discuss the true +place in English literature of this unique product of the human +imagination. One is bound, however, to attempt to correlate and adjust +it to the rest of the poet's work, and this, it must be admitted, is a +most difficult piece of business. Never was there a poem so irritating +to a critic of the "pigeon-holing" variety. It simply defies him; and +yet the instinct which he obeys is so excusable, because in fact so +universal, that one feels guilty of something like disloyalty to the +very principles of order in smiling at his disappointment. Complete and +symmetrical classification is so fascinating an amusement; it would +simplify so many subjects of study, if men and things would only +consent to rank themselves under different categories, and remain +there; it would, in particular, be so inexpressibly convenient to be +able to lay your hand upon your poet whenever you wanted him by merely +turning to a shelf labelled "Realistic" or "Imaginative" (nay, perhaps, +to the still greater saving of labour--Objective or Subjective), that +we cannot be surprised at the strength of the aforesaid instinct in +many a critical mind. Nor should it be hard to realise its revolt +against those single exceptions which bring its generalisations to +nought. When the pigeon-hole will admit every "document" but one, the +case is hard indeed; and it is not too much to say that the _Ancient +Mariner_ is the one document which the pigeon-hole in this instance +declines to admit. If Coleridge had only refrained from writing this +remarkable poem, or if, having done so, he had written more poems like +it, the critic might have ticketed him with a quiet mind, and gone on +his way complacent. As it is, however, the poet has contrived in virtue +of this performance not only to defeat classification but to defy it. +For the weird ballad abounds in those very qualities in which +Coleridge's poetry with all its merits is most conspicuously deficient, +while on the other hand it is wholly free from the faults with which he +is most frequently and justly chargeable. One would not have said in +the first place that the author of _Religious Musings_, still less +of the _Monody on the Death of Chatterton_, was by any means the +man to have compassed triumphantly at the very first attempt the +terseness, vigour, and _naivete_ of the true ballad-manner. To +attain this, Coleridge, the student of his early verse must feel, would +have rather more to retrench and much more to restrain than might be +the case with many other youthful poets. The exuberance of immaturity, +the want of measure, the "not knowing where to stop," are certainly +even more conspicuous in the poems of 1796 than they are in most +productions of the same stage of poetic development; and these +qualities, it is needless to say, require very stern chastening from +him who would succeed in the style which Coleridge attempted for the +first time in the _Ancient Mariner_. + +The circumstances of this immortal ballad's birth have been related +with such fulness of detail by Wordsworth, and Coleridge's own +references to them are so completely reconcilable with that account, +that it must have required all De Quincey's consummate ingenuity as a +mischief-maker to detect any discrepancy between the two. + +In the autumn of 1797, records Wordsworth in the MS. notes which he +left behind him, "Mr. Coleridge, my sister, and myself started from +Alfoxden pretty late in the afternoon with a view to visit Linton and +the Valley of Stones near to it; and as our united funds were very +small, we agreed to defray the expense of the tour by writing a poem to +be sent to the _New Monthly Magazine_. Accordingly we set off, and +proceeded along the Quantock Hills towards Watchet; and in the course +of this walk was planned the poem of the _Ancient Mariner_, +founded on a dream, as Mr. Coleridge said, of his friend Mr. +Cruikshank. Much the greatest part of the story was Mr. Coleridge's +invention, but certain parts I suggested; for example, some crime was +to be committed which should bring upon the Old Navigator, as Coleridge +afterwards delighted to call him, the spectral persecution, as a +consequence of that crime and his own wanderings. I had been reading in +Shelvocke's _Voyages_, a day or two before, that while doubling +Cape Horn they frequently saw albatrosses in that latitude, the largest +sort of sea-fowl, some extending their wings twelve or thirteen feet. +'Suppose,' said I, 'you represent him as having killed one of these +birds on entering the South Sea, and that the tutelary spirits of these +regions take upon them to avenge the crime.' The incident was thought +fit for the purpose, and adopted accordingly. I also suggested the +navigation of the ship by the dead men, but do not recollect that I had +anything more to do with the scheme of the poem. The gloss with which +it was subsequently accompanied was not thought of by either of us at +the time, at least not a hint of it was given to me, and I have no +doubt it was a gratuitous afterthought. We began the composition +together on that to me memorable evening. I furnished two or three +lines at the beginning of the poem, in particular-- + + "'And listened like a three years' child: + The Mariner had his will.' + +"These trifling contributions, all but one, which Mr. C. has with +unnecessary scrupulosity recorded,[3] slipped out of his mind, as they +well might. As we endeavoured to proceed conjointly (I speak of the +same evening) our respective manners proved so widely different that it +would have been quite presumptuous in me to do anything but separate +from an undertaking upon which I could only have been a clog.... The +_Ancient Mariner_ grew and grew till it became too important for +our first object, which was limited to our expectation of five pounds; +and we began to think of a volume which was to consist, as Mr. +Coleridge has told the world, of poems chiefly on supernatural +subjects." Except that the volume ultimately determined on was to +consist only "partly" and not "chiefly" of poems on supernatural +subjects (in the result, as has been seen, it consisted "chiefly" of +poems upon natural subjects), there is nothing in this account which +cannot be easily reconciled with the probable facts upon which De +Quincey bases his hinted charge against Coleridge in his _Lake +Poets_. It was not Coleridge who had been reading Shelvocke's +_Voyages_, but Wordsworth, and it is quite conceivable, therefore, +that the source from which his friend had derived the idea of the +killing of the albatross may (if indeed he was informed of it at the +time) have escaped his memory twelve years afterwards, when the +conversation with De Quincey took place. Hence, in "disowning his +obligations to Shelvocke," he may not by any means have intended to +suggest that the albatross incident was his own thought. Moreover, De +Quincey himself supplies another explanation of the matter, which we +know, from the above-quoted notes of Wordsworth's, to be founded upon +fact. "It is possible," he adds, "from something which Coleridge said +on another occasion, that before meeting a fable in which to embody his +ideas he had meditated a poem on delirium, confounding its own dream- +scenery with external things, and connected with the imagery of high +latitudes." Nothing, in fact, would be more natural than that +Coleridge, whose idea of the haunted seafarer was primarily suggested +by his friend's dream, and had no doubt been greatly elaborated in his +own imagination before being communicated to Wordsworth at all, should +have been unable, after a considerable lapse of time, to distinguish +between incidents of his own imagining and those suggested to him by +others. And, in any case, the "unnecessary scrupulosity," rightly +attributed to him by Wordsworth with respect to this very poem, is +quite incompatible with any intentional denial of obligations. + +Such, then, was the singular and even prosaic origin of the _Ancient +Mariner_--a poem written to defray the expenses of a tour; surely +the most sublime of "pot-boilers" to be found in all literature. It is +difficult, from amid the astonishing combination of the elements of +power, to select that which is the most admirable; but, considering +both the character of the story and of its particular vehicle, perhaps +the greatest achievement of the poem is the simple realistic force of +its narrative. To achieve this was of course Coleridge's main object: +he had undertaken to "transfer from our inward nature a human interest +and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of +imaginations that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which +constitutes poetic faith." But it is easier to undertake this than to +perform it, and much easier to perform it in prose than in verse--with +the assistance of the everyday and the commonplace than without it. +Balzac's _Peau de Chagrin_ is no doubt a great feat of the +realistic-supernatural; but no one can help feeling how much the author +is aided by his "broker's clerk" style of description, and by the +familiar Parisian scenes among which he makes his hero move. It is +easier to compass verisimilitude in the Palais-Royal than on the South +Pacific, to say nothing of the thousand assisting touches, out of place +in rhyme and metre, which can be thrown into a prose narrative. The +_Ancient Mariner_, however, in spite of all these drawbacks, is as +real to the reader as is the hero of the _Peau de Chagrin_; we are +as convinced of the curse upon one of the doomed wretches as upon the +other; and the strange phantasmagoric haze which is thrown around the +ship and the lonely voyager leaves their outlines as clear as if we saw +them through the sunshine of the streets of Paris. Coleridge triumphs +over his difficulties by sheer vividness of imagery and terse vigour of +descriptive phrase--two qualities for which his previous poems did not +prove him to possess by any means so complete a mastery. For among all +the beauties of his earlier landscapes we can hardly reckon that of +intense and convincing truth. He seems seldom before to have written, +as Wordsworth nearly always seems to write, "with his eye on the +object;" and certainly he never before displayed any remarkable power +of completing his word-picture with a few touches. In the _Ancient +Mariner_ his eye seems never to wander from his object, and again +and again the scene starts out upon the canvas in two or three strokes +of the brush. The skeleton ship, with the dicing demons on its deck; +the setting sun peering "through its ribs, as if through a dungeon- +grate;" the water-snakes under the moonbeams, with the "elfish light" +falling off them "in hoary flakes" when they reared; the dead crew, who +work the ship and "raise their limbs like lifeless tools"--everything +seems to have been actually _seen_, and we believe it all as the +story of a truthful eye-witness. The details of the voyage, too, are +all chronicled with such order and regularity, there is such a diary- +like air about the whole thing, that we accept it almost as if it were +a series of extracts from the ship's "log." Then again the execution--a +great thing to be said of so long a poem--is marvellously equal +throughout; the story never drags or flags for a moment, its felicities +of diction are perpetual, and it is scarcely marred by a single weak +line. What could have been better said of the instantaneous descent of +the tropical night than + + "The Sun's rim dips; the stars rush out: + At one stride comes the dark;" + +what more weirdly imagined of the "cracks and growls" of the rending +iceberg than that they sounded "like noises in a swound"? And how +beautifully steals in the passage that follows upon the cessation of +the spirit's song-- + + "It ceased; yet still the sails made on + A pleasant noise till noon, + A noise like to a hidden brook + In the leafy month of June, + That to the sleeping woods all night + Singeth a quiet tune." + +Then, as the ballad draws to its close, after the ship has +drifted over the harbour-bar-- + + "And I with sobs did pray-- + O let me be awake, my God; + Or let me sleep alway," + +with what consummate art are we left to imagine the physical traces +which the mariner's long agony had left behind it by a method far more +terrible than any direct description--the effect, namely, which the +sight of him produces upon others-- + + "I moved my lips--the Pilot shrieked + And fell down in a fit; + The holy Hermit raised his eyes, + And prayed where he did sit. + + "I took the oars: the Pilot's boy, + _Who now doth crazy go_, + Laughed loud and long, and all the while + His eyes went to and fro. + 'Ha! ha!' quoth he, 'full plain I see, + The Devil knows how to row.'" + +Perfect consistency of plan, in short, and complete equality of +execution, brevity, self-restraint, and an unerring sense of artistic +propriety--these are the chief notes of the _Ancient Mariner_, as +they are _not_, in my humble judgment, the chief notes of any poem +of Coleridge's before or since. And hence it is that this masterpiece +of ballad minstrelsy is, as has been said, so confounding to the +"pigeon-holing" mind. + +The next most famous poem of this or indeed of any period of Coleridge's +life is the fragment of _Christabel_, which, however, in spite of +the poet's own opinion on that point, it is difficult to regard as "a +more effective realisation" of the "natural-supernatural" idea. Beautiful +as it is, it possesses none of that human interest with which, according +to this idea, the narrator of the poetic story must undertake to invest +it. Nor can the unfinished condition in which it was left be fairly held +to account for this, for the characters themselves--the lady Christabel, +the witch Geraldine, and even the baron Sir Leoline himself--are somewhat +shadowy creations, with too little hold upon life and reality, and too +much resemblance to the flitting figures of a dream. Powerful in their +way as are the lines descriptive of the spell thrown over Christabel by +her uncanny guest--lines at the recitation of which Shelley is said to +have fainted--we cannot say that they strike a reader with such a sense of +horror as should be excited by the contemplation of a real flesh-and-blood +maiden subdued by "the shrunken serpent eyes" of a sorceress, and +constrained "passively to imitate" their "look of dull and treacherous +hate." Judging it, however, by any other standard than that of the poet's +own erecting, one must certainly admit the claim of _Christabel_ to +rank very high as a work of pure creative art. It is so thoroughly +suffused and permeated with the glow of mystical romance, the whole +atmosphere of the poem is so exquisitely appropriate to the subject, +and so marvellously preserved throughout, that our lack of belief in +the reality of the scenes presented to us detracts but little from the +pleasure afforded by the artistic excellence of its presentment. It +abounds, too, in isolated pictures of surpassing vividness and grace-- +word-pictures which live in the "memory of the eye" with all the +wholeness and tenacity of an actual painting. Geraldine appearing to +Christabel beneath the oak, and the two women stepping lightly across +the hall "that echoes still, pass as lightly as you will," are pictures +of this kind; and nowhere out of Keats's _Eve of St. Agnes_ is +there any "interior" to match that of Christabel's chamber, done as it +is in little more than half a dozen lines. These beauties, it is true, +are fragmentary, like the poem itself, but there is no reason to +believe that the poem itself would have gained anything in its +entirety--that is to say, as a poetic narrative--by completion. Its +main idea--that the purity of a pure maiden is a charm more powerful +for the protection of those dear to her than the spells of the evil one +for their destruction--had been already sufficiently indicated, and the +mode in which Coleridge, it seems, intended to have worked would hardly +have added anything to its effect. [4] And although he clung till very +late in life to the belief that he _could_ have finished it in +after days with no change of poetic manner--"If easy in my mind," he +says in a letter to be quoted hereafter, "I have no doubt either of the +reawakening power or of the kindling inclination"--there are few +students of his later poems who will share his confidence. Charles Lamb +strongly recommended him to leave it unfinished, and Hartley Coleridge, +in every respect as competent a judge on that point as could well be +found, always declared his conviction that his father could not, at +least _qualis ab incepto_, have finished the poem. + +The much-admired little piece first published in the _Lyrical Ballads_ +under the title of _Love_, and probably best known by its +(original) first and most pregnant stanza, [5] possesses a twofold +interest for the student of Coleridge's life and works, as illustrating +at once one of the most marked characteristics of his peculiar +temperament, and one of the most distinctive features of his poetic +manner. The lines are remarkable for a certain strange fascination of +melody--a quality for which Coleridge, who was not unreasonably proud +of his musical gift, is said to have especially prized them; and they +are noteworthy also as perhaps the fullest expression of the almost +womanly softness of Coleridge's nature. To describe their tone as +effeminate would be unfair and untrue, for effeminacy in the work of a +male hand would necessarily imply something of falsity of sentiment, +and from this they are entirely free. But it must certainly be admitted +that for a man's description of his wooing the warmth of feeling which +pervades them is as nearly sexless in character as it is possible to +conceive; and, beautiful as the verses are, one cannot but feel that +they only escape the "namby-pamby" by the breadth of a hair. + +As to the wild dream-poem _Kubla Khan_, it is hardly more than a +psychological curiosity, and only that perhaps in respect of the +completeness of its metrical form. For amid its picturesque but vague +imagery there is nothing which might not have presented itself, and the +like of which has not perhaps actually presented itself, to many a +half-awakened brain of far lower imaginative energy during its hours of +full daylight consciousness than that of Coleridge. Nor possibly is it +quite an unknown experience to many of us to have even a fully-written +record, so to speak, of such impressions imprinted instantaneously on +the mind, the conscious composition of whole pages of narrative, +descriptive, or cogitative matter being compressed as it were into a +moment of time. Unfortunately, however, the impression made upon the +ordinary brain is effaced as instantaneously as it is produced; the +abnormal exaltation of the creative and apprehensive power is quite +momentary, being probably indeed confined to the single moment between +sleep and waking; and the mental tablet which a second before was +covered so thickly with the transcripts of ideas and images, all far +more vivid, or imagined to be so, than those of waking life, and all +apprehended with a miraculous simultaneity by the mind, is converted +into a _tabula rasa_ in the twinkling of a half-opened eye. The wonder in +Coleridge's case was that his brain retained the word-impressions +sufficiently long to enable him to commit them, to the extent at least +of some fifty odd lines, to paper, and that, according to his own +belief, this is but a mere fraction of what but for an unlucky +interruption in the work of transcribing he would have been able to +preserve. His own account of this curious incident is as follows:-- + +"In the summer of 1797 the author, then in ill health, had retired to a +lonely farmhouse between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of +Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an +anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep +in his chair at the moment that he was reading, the following sentence, +or words of the same substance, in Purchas's _Pilgrimage_:--'Here +the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden +thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were enclosed by a +wall.' The Author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, +at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most +vivid confidence that he could not have composed less than from two to +three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which +all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production +of the corresponding expressions, without any sensation or +consciousness of effect. On awaking he appeared to himself to have a +distinct recollection of the whole, and, taking his pen, ink, and +paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here +preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person +on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his +return to his room found, to his no small surprise and mortification, +that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the +general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or +ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the +images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, +but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter." + +This poem, though written in 1797, remained, like _Christabel_, in +MS. till 1816. These were then published in a thin quarto volume, together +with another piece called the _Pains of Sleep_, a composition of many +years' later date than the other two, and of which there will be +occasion to say a word or two hereafter. + +At no time, however, not even in this the high-tide of its activity, +was the purely poetic impulse dominant for long together in +Coleridge's mind. He was born with the instincts of the orator, and +still more with those of the teacher, and I doubt whether he ever +really regarded himself as fulfilling the true mission of his life +except at those moments when he was seeking by spoken word to exercise +direct influence over his fellow-men. At the same time, however, such +was the restlessness of his intellect, and such his instability of +purpose, that he could no more remain constant to what he deemed his +true vocation than he could to any other. This was now to be signally +illustrated. Soon after the _Ancient Mariner_ was written, and +some time before the volume which was to contain it appeared, Coleridge +quitted Stowey for Shrewsbury to undertake the duties of a Unitarian +preacher in that town. This was in the month of January 1798, [6] and +it seems pretty certain, though exact dates are not to be ascertained, +that he was back again at Stowey early in the month of February. In the +pages of the _Liberal_ (1822) William Hazlitt has given a most +graphic and picturesque description of Coleridge's appearance and +performance in his Shrewsbury pulpit; and, judging from this, one can +well believe, what indeed was to have been antecedently expected, that +had he chosen to remain faithful to his new employment he might have +rivalled the reputation of the greatest preacher of the time. But his +friends the Wedgwoods, the two sons of the great potter, whose +acquaintance he had made a few years earlier, were apparently much +dismayed at the prospect of his deserting the library for the chapel, +and they offered him an annuity of L150 a year on condition of his +retiring from the ministry and devoting himself entirely to the study +of poetry and philosophy. Coleridge was staying at the house of +Hazlitt's father when the letter containing this liberal offer reached +him, "and he seemed," says the younger Hazlitt, "to make up his mind to +close with the proposal in the act of tying on one of his shoes." +Another inducement to so speedy an acceptance of it is no doubt to be +found in the fact of its presenting to Coleridge an opportunity for the +fulfilment of a cherished desire--that, namely, of "completing his +education," as he regarded it, by studying the German language, and +acquiring an acquaintance with the theology and philosophy of Germany +in that country itself. This prospect he was enabled, through the +generosity of the Wedgwoods, to put into execution towards the end of +1798. But before passing on from this culminating and, to all intents +and purposes, this closing year of Coleridge's career as a poet it will +be proper to attempt something like a final review of his poetic work. +Admirable as much of that work is, and unique in quality as it is +throughout, I must confess that it leaves on my own mind a stronger +impression of the unequal and imperfect than does that of any poet at +all approaching Coleridge in imaginative vigour and intellectual grasp. +It is not a mere inequality and imperfection of style like that which +so seriously detracts from the pleasure of reading Byron. Nor is it +that the thought is often _impar sibi_--that, like Wordsworth's, +it is too apt to descend from the mountain-tops of poetry to the flats +of commonplace, if not into the bogs of bathos. In both these respects +Coleridge may and does occasionally offend, but his workmanship is, on +the whole, as much more artistic than Byron's as the material of his +poetry is of more uniformly equal value than Wordsworth's. Yet, with +almost the sole exception of the _Ancient Mariner_, his work is in +a certain sense more disappointing than that of either. In spite of his +theory as to the twofold function of poetry we must finally judge that +of Coleridge, as of any other poet, by its relation to the actual. +Ancient Mariners and Christabels--the people, the scenery, and the +incidents of an imaginary world--may be handled by poetry once and +again to the wonder and delight of man; but feats of this kind cannot-- +or cannot in the Western world, at any rate--be repeated indefinitely, +and the ultimate test of poetry, at least for the modern European +reader, is its treatment of actualities--its relations to the world of +human action, passion, sensation, thought. And when we try Coleridge's +poetry in any one of these four regions of life, we seem forced to +admit that, despite all its power and beauty, it at no moment succeeds +in convincing us, as at their best moments Wordsworth's and even +Byron's continually does, that the poet has found his true poetic +vocation--that he is interpreting that aspect of life which he can +interpret better than he can any other, and which no other poet, save +the one who has vanquished all poets in their own special fields of +achievement, can interpret as well as he. In no poem of actuality does +Coleridge so victoriously show himself to be the right man at the right +work as does Wordsworth in certain moods of seership and Byron in +certain moments of passion. Of them at such moods and moments we feel +assured that they have discovered where their real strength lies, and +have put it forth to the utmost. But we never feel satisfied that +Coleridge has discovered where _his_ real strength lies, and he +strikes us as feeling no more certainty on the point himself. Strong as +is his pinion, his flight seems to resemble rather that of the eaglet +than of the full-grown eagle even to the last. He continues "mewing his +mighty youth" a little too long. There is a tentativeness of manner +which seems to come from a conscious aptitude for many poetic styles +and an incapacity to determine which should be definitively adopted and +cultivated to perfection. Hence one too often returns from any +prolonged ramble through Coleridge's poetry with an unsatisfied feeling +which does not trouble us on our return from the best literary country +of Byron or Wordsworth. Byron has taken us by rough roads, and +Wordsworth led us through some desperately flat and dreary lowlands to +his favourite "bits;" but we feel that we have seen mountain and +valley, wood and river, glen and waterfall at their best. But +Coleridge's poetry leaves too much of the feeling of a walk through a +fine country on a misty day. We may have had many a peep of beautiful +scenery and occasional glimpses of the sublime; but the medium of +vision has been of variable quality, and somehow we come home with an +uneasy suspicion that we have not seen as much as we might. It is +obvious, however, even upon a cursory consideration of the matter, that +this disappointing element in Coleridge's poetry is a necessary result +of the circumstances of its production; for the period of his +productive activity (at least after attaining manhood) was too short to +enable a mind with so many intellectual distractions to ascertain its +true poetic bent, and to concentrate its energies thereupon. If he +seems always to be feeling his way towards the work which he could do +best, it is for the very good reason that this is what, from 1796 to +1800, he was continually doing as a matter of fact. The various styles +which he attempted--and for a season, in each case, with such brilliant +results--are forms of poetic expression corresponding, on the face of +them, to poetic impulses of an essentially fleeting nature. The +political or politico-religious odes were the offspring of youthful +democratic enthusiasm; the supernatural poems, so to call them for want +of a better name, had their origin in an almost equally youthful and +more than equally transitory passion for the wild and wondrous. +Political disillusion is fatal to the one impulse, and mere advance in +years extinguishes the other. Visions of Ancient Mariners and +Christabels do not revisit the mature man, and the Toryism of middle +life will hardly inspire odes to anything. + +With the extinction of these two forms of creative impulse Coleridge's +poetic activity, from causes to be considered hereafter, came almost +entirely to an end, and into what later forms it might subsequently +have developed remains therefore a matter more or less of conjecture. +Yet I think there is almost a sufficiency of _a priori_ evidence +as to what that form would have been. Had the poet in him survived +until years had "brought the philosophic mind," he would doubtless have +done for the human spirit, in its purely isolated self-communings, what +Wordsworth did for it in its communion with external nature. All that +the poetry of Wordsworth is for the mind which loves to hold converse +with the world of things; this, and more perhaps than this--if more be +possible--would the poetry of Coleridge have been for the mind which +abides by preference in the world of self-originating emotion and +introspective thought. Wordsworth's primary function is to interpret +nature to man: the interpretation of man to himself is with him a +secondary process only-the response, in almost every instance, to +impressions from without. This poet can nobly brace the human heart to +fortitude; but he must first have seen the leech-gatherer on the lonely +moor. The "presence and the spirit interfused" throughout creation is +revealed to us in moving and majestic words; yet the poet requires to +have felt it "in the light of setting suns and the round ocean and the +living air" before he feels it "in the mind of man." But what +Wordsworth grants only to the reader who wanders with him in +imagination by lake and mountain, the Muse of Coleridge, had she lived, +would have bestowed upon the man who has entered into his inner chamber +and shut to the door. This, it seems to me, is the work for which +genius, temperament, and intellectual habit would alike have fitted +him. For while his feeling for internal nature was undoubtedly less +profound, less mystically penetrating than Wordsworth's, his +sensibilities in general were incomparably quicker and more subtle than +those of the friend in whom he so generously recognised a master; and +the reach of his sympathies extends to forms of human emotion, to +subjects of human interest which lay altogether outside the somewhat +narrow range of Wordsworth's. + +And, with so magnificent a furniture of those mental and moral +qualities which should belong to "a singer of man to men," it must not +be forgotten that his technical equipment for the work was of the most +splendidly effective kind. If a critic like Mr. Swinburne seems to +speak in exaggerated praise of Coleridge's lyrics, we can well +understand their enchantment for a master of music like himself. +Probably it was the same feeling which made Shelley describe +_France_ as "the finest ode in the English language." With all, in +fact, who hold--as it is surely plausible to hold--that the first duty +of a singer is to sing, the poetry of Coleridge will always be more +likely to be classed above than below its merits, great as they are. +For, if we except some occasional lapses in his sonnets--a metrical +form in which, at his best, he is quite "out of the running" with +Wordsworth--his melody never fails him. He is a singer always, as +Wordsworth is not always, and Byron almost never. The _'olian +Harp_ to which he so loved to listen does not more surely respond in +music to the breeze of heaven than does Coleridge's poetic utterance to +the wind of his inspiration. Of the dreamy fascination which Love +exercises over a listening ear I have already spoken; and there is +hardly less charm in the measure and assonances of the _Circassian +Love Chant. Christabel_ again, considered solely from the metrical +point of view, is a veritable _tour de force_--the very model of a +metre for romantic legend: as which, indeed, it was imitated with +sufficient grace and spirit, but seldom with anything approaching to +Coleridge's melody, by Sir Walter Scott. + +Endowed therefore with so glorious a gift of song, and only not fully +master of his poetic means because of the very versatility of his +artistic power and the very variety and catholicity of his youthful +sympathies, it is unhappily but too certain that the world has lost +much by that perversity of conspiring accidents which so untimely +silenced Coleridge's muse. And the loss is the more trying to posterity +because he seems, to a not, I think, too curiously considering +criticism, to have once actually struck that very chord which would +have sounded the most movingly beneath his touch,--and to have struck +it at the very moment when the failing hand was about to quit the keys +for ever. + + "Ostendunt terris hunc tantum fata neque ultra + Esse sinunt." + +I cannot regard it as merely fantastic to believe that the +_Dejection_, that dirge of infinite pathos over the grave of +creative imagination, might, but for the fatal decree which had by that +time gone forth against Coleridge's health and happiness, have been but +the cradle-cry of a new-born poetic power, in which imagination, not +annihilated but transmigrant, would have splendidly proved its vitality +through other forms of song. + + +FOOTNOTES + +1. Perhaps the deepest impress of the Wordsworthian influence is to be +found in the little poem _Frost at Midnight_, with its affecting +apostrophe to the sleeping infant at his side--infant destined to +develop as wayward a genius and to lead as restless and irresolute a +life as his father. Its closing lines-- + + "Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee + Whether the summer clothe the general earth + With greenness... + ... whether the eave-drops fall, + Heard only in the trances of the blast, + Or if the secret ministry of frost + Shall hang them up in silent icicles + Quietly shining to the quiet moon"-- + +might have flowed straight from the pen of Wordsworth himself. + +2. "You had a great loss in not seeing Coleridge. He is a wonderful +man. His conversation teems with soul, mind, and spirit. Then he is so +benevolent, so good tempered and cheerful, and, like William, interests +himself so much about every little trifle. At first I thought him very +plain, that is, for about three minutes; he is pale, thin, has a wide +mouth, thick lips, and not very good teeth, longish loose-growing half- +curling rough black hair. But if you hear him speak for five minutes +you think no more of them. His eye is large and full, and not very dark +but gray, such an eye as would receive from a heavy soul the dullest +expression; but it speaks every emotion of his animated mind: it has +more of the poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling than I ever witnessed. +He has fine dark eyebrows and an overhanging forehead." + +3. The lines-- + + "And it is long, and lank, and brown, + As is the ribbed sea-sand." + +4. Mr. Gillman (in his _Life_, p. 301) gives the following +somewhat bald outline of what were to form the two concluding cantos, +no doubt on the authority of Coleridge himself. The second canto ends, +it may be remembered, with the despatch of Bracy the bard to the castle +of Sir Roland:--"Over the mountains the Bard, as directed by Sir +Leoline, hastes with his disciple; but, in consequence of one of those +inundations supposed to be common to the country, the spot only where +the castle once stood is discovered, the edifice itself being washed +away. He determines to return. Geraldine, being acquainted with all +that is passing, like the weird sisters in _Macbeth_, vanishes. +Reappearing, however, she awaits the return of the Bard, exciting in +the meantime by her wily arts all the anger she could rouse in the +Baron's breast, as well as that jealousy of which he is described to +have been susceptible. The old bard and the youth at length arrive, and +therefore she can no longer personate the character of Geraldine, the +daughter of Lord Roland de Vaux, but changes her appearance to that of +the accepted though absent lover of Christabel. Next ensues a courtship +most distressing to Christabel, who feels--she knows not why--great +disgust for her once favoured knight. This coldness is very painful to +the Baron, who has no more conception than herself of the supernatural +transformation. She at last yields to her father's entreaties, and +consents to approach the altar with the hated suitor. The real lover +returning, enters at this moment, and produces the ring which she had +once given him in sign of her betrothment. Thus defeated, the +supernatural being Geraldine disappears. As predicted, the castle-bell +tolls, the mother's voice is heard, and, to the exceeding great joy of +the parties, the rightful marriage takes place, after which follows a +reconciliation and explanation between father and daughter." +5. + + "All thoughts, all passions, all delights, + Whatever stirs this mortal frame, + All are but ministers of Love, + And feed his sacred flame." + +6. It may be suggested that this sudden resolution was forced upon +Coleridge by the _res angusta domi_. But I do not think that was +the case. In the winter of 1797 he had obtained an introduction to and +entered into a literary engagement with Mr. Stuart of the _Morning +Post_, and could thus have met, as in fact he afterwards did meet, +the necessities of the hour. + + + + +CHAPTER IV. + +Visit to Germany--Life at Gottingen,--Return--Explores the Lake Country +--London--The _Morning Post_--Coleridge as a journalist--Retirement +to Keswick. + +[1799-1800.] + + +The departure of the two poets for the Continent was delayed only till +they had seen their joint volume through the press. The _Lyrical +Ballads_ appeared in the autumn of 1798, and on 16th September of +that year Coleridge left Yarmouth for Hamburg with Wordsworth and his +sister. [1] The purpose of his two companions' tour is not known to +have been other than the pleasure, or mixed pleasure and instruction, +usually derivable from foreign travel; that of Coleridge was strictly, +even sternly, educational. Immediately on his arrival in Germany he +parted from the Wordsworths, who went on to Gozlar, [2] and took up his +abode at the house of the pastor at Ratzeburg, with whom he spent five +months in assiduous study of the language. In January he removed to +Gottingen. Of his life here during the next few months we possess an +interesting record in the _Early Years and Late Reflections_ of +Dr. Carrlyon, a book published many years after the events which it +relates, but which is quite obviously a true reflection of impressions +yet fresh in the mind of its writer when its materials were first +collected. Its principal value, in fact, is that it gives us Coleridge +from the standpoint of the average young educated Englishman of the +day, sufficiently intelligent, indeed, to be sensible of his fellow- +student's transcendent abilities, but as little awed by them out of +youth's healthy irreverence of criticism as the ordinary English +undergraduate ever has been by the intellectual supremacy of any +"greatest man of his day" who might chance to have been his +contemporary at Oxford or Cambridge. In Dr. Carrlyon's reminiscences +and in the quoted letters of a certain young Parry, another of the +English student colony at Gottingen, we get a piquant picture of the +poet-philosopher of seven-and-twenty, with his yet buoyant belief in +his future, his still unquenched interest in the world of things, and +his never-to-be-quenched interest in the world of thought, his even +then inexhaustible flow of disquisition, his generous admiration for +the gifts of others, and his _naive_ complacency--including, it +would seem, a touch of the vanity of personal appearance--in his own. +"He frequently," writes Dr. Carrlyon, "recited his own poetry, and not +unfrequently led us further into the labyrinth of his metaphysical +elucidations, either of particular passages or of the original +conception of any of his productions, than we were able to follow him. +At the conclusion, for instance, of the first stanza of +_Christabel_, he would perhaps comment at full length upon such a +line as 'Tu--whit!--Tu--whoo!' that we might not fall into the mistake +of supposing originality to be its sole merit." The example is not very +happily chosen, for Coleridge could hardly have claimed "originality" +for an onomatopoeia which occurs in one of Shakspeare's best known +lyrics; but it serves well enough to illustrate the fact that he "very +seldom went right to the end of any piece of poetry; to pause and +analyse was his delight." His disappointment with regard to his tragedy +of _Osorio_ was, we also learn, still fresh. He seldom, we are +told, "recited any of the beautiful passages with which it abounds +without a visible interruption of the perfect composure of his mind." +He mentioned with great emotion Sheridan's inexcusable treatment of him +with respect to it. At the same time, adds his friend, "he is a severe +critic of his own productions, and declares" (this no doubt with +reference to his then, and indeed his constant estimate of +_Christabel_ as his masterpiece) "that his best poems have perhaps +not appeared in print." + +Young Parry's account of his fellow-student is also fresh and pleasing. +"It is very delightful," he tells a correspondent, "to hear him sometimes +discourse on religious topics for an hour together. His fervour is +particularly agreeable when compared with the chilling speculations of +German philosophers," whom Coleridge, he adds, "successively forced to +abandon all their strongholds." He is "much liked, notwithstanding many +peculiarities. He is very liberal towards all doctrines and opinions, +and cannot be put out of temper. These circumstances give him the +advantage of his opponents, who are always bigoted and often irascible. +Coleridge is an enthusiast on many subjects, and must therefore appear +to many to possess faults, and no doubt he has faults, but he has a +good heart and a large mass of information with," as his fellow-student +condescendingly admits, "superior talents. The great fault which his +friends may lament is the variety of subjects which he adopts, and the +abstruse nature of his ordinary speculations, _extra homines podtas_. +They can easily," concludes the writer, rising here to the full +stateliness of youth's epistolary style, "they can easily excuse his +devoted attachment to his country, and his reasoning as to the means of +producing the greatest human happiness, but they do not universally +approve the mysticism of his metaphysics and the remoteness of his +topics from human comprehension." + +In the month of May 1799 Coleridge set out with a party of his fellow- +students on a walking tour through the Harz Mountains, an excursion +productive of much oral philosophising on his part, and of the +composition of the _Lines on ascending the Brocken_, not one of the +happiest efforts of his muse. As to the philosophising, "he never," says +one of his companions on this trip, "appeared to tire of mental exercise; +talk seemed to him a perennial pastime, and his endeavours to inform and +amuse us ended only with the cravings of hunger or the fatigue of a long +march, from which neither his conversational powers nor his stoicism +could protect himself or us." It speaks highly for the matter of +Coleridge's allocutions that such incessant outpourings during a +mountaineering tramp appear to have left no lasting impression of +boredom behind them. The holiday seems to have been thoroughly enjoyed +by the whole party, and Coleridge, at any rate, had certainly earned +it. For once, and it is almost to be feared for the last time in his +life, he had resisted his besetting tendency to dispersiveness, and +constrained his intelligence to apply itself to one thing at a time. +He had come to Germany to acquire the language, and to learn what of +German theology and metaphysics he might find worth the study, and his +five months' steady pursuit of the former object had been followed by +another four months of resolute prosecution of the latter. He attended +the lectures of Professor Blumenbach, and obtained through a fellow- +student notes from those of Eichhorn. He suffered no interruption in +his studies, unless we are to except a short visit from Wordsworth +and his sister, who had spent most of their stay abroad in residence +at Gozlar; and he appears, in short, to have made in every way the best +use of his time. On 24th June 1799 he gave his leave-taking supper at +Gottingen, replying to the toast of his health in fluent German but +with an execrable accent; and the next day presumably he started on his +homeward journey. + +His movements for the next few months are incorrectly stated in most of +the brief memoirs prefixed to the various editions of the poet's works, +--their writers having, it is to be imagined, accepted without +examination a misplaced date of Mr. Gillman's. It is not the fact that +Coleridge "returned to England after an absence of fourteen months, and +arrived in London the 27th of November." His absence could not have +lasted longer than a year, for we know from the evidence of Miss +Wordsworth's diary that he was exploring the Lake country (very likely +for the first time) in company with her brother and herself in the month +of September 1799. The probability is that he arrived in England early +in July, and immediately thereupon did the most natural and proper thing +to be done under the circumstances--namely, returned to his wife and +children at Nether Stowey, and remained there for the next two months, +after which he set off with the Wordsworths, then still at Alfoxden, to +visit the district to which the latter had either already resolved upon, +or were then contemplating, the transfer of their abode. The 27th of +November is no doubt the correct date of his arrival in London, though not +"from abroad." And his first six weeks in the metropolis were spent in a +very characteristic fashion--in the preparation, namely, of a work which +he pronounced with perfect accuracy to be destined to fall dead from the +press. He shut himself up in a lodging in Buckingham Street, Strand, +and by the end of the above-mentioned period he had completed his +admirable translation of _Wallenstein_, in itself a perfect, and +indeed his most perfect dramatic poem. The manuscript of this English +version of Schiller's drama was purchased by Messrs. Longman under the +condition that the translation and the original should appear at the +same time. Very few copies were sold, and the publishers, indifferent +to Coleridge's advice to retain the unsold copies until the book should +become fashionable, disposed of them as waste paper. Sixteen years +afterwards, on the publication of _Christabel_, they were eagerly +sought for, and the few remaining copies doubled their price. It was +while engaged upon this work that he formed that connection with +political jouralism which lasted, though with intermissions, throughout +most of the remainder of his life. His early poetical pieces had, as we +have seen, made their first appearance in the _Morning Post_, but +hitherto that newspaper had received no prose contribution from his +pen. His engagement with its proprietor, Mr. Daniel Stuart, to whom he +had been introduced during a visit to London in 1797, was to contribute +an occasional copy of verses for a stipulated annual sum; and some +dozen or so of his poems (notably among them the ode to _France_ +and the two strange pieces _Fire Famine and Slaughter_ and _The +Devil's Thoughts_) had entered the world in this way during the +years 1798 and 1799. + +Misled by the error above corrected, the writers of some of the brief +memoirs of Coleridge's life represent him as having sent verse +contributions to the _Morning Post_ from Germany in 1799; but as +the earliest of these only appeared in August of that year there is no +reason to suppose that any of them were written before his return to +England. The longest of the serious pieces is the well-known _Ode to +Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire_, which cannot be regarded as one +of the happiest of Coleridge's productions. Its motive is certainly a +little slight, and its sentiment more than a little overstrained. The +noble enthusiasm of the noble lady who, "though nursed in pomp and +pleasure," could yet condescend to "hail the platform wild where once +the Austrian fell beneath the shaft of Tell," hardly strikes a reader +of the present day as remarkable enough to be worth "gushing" over; and +when the poet goes on to suggest as the explanation of Georgiana's +having "learned that heroic measure" that the Whig great lady had +suckled her own children, we certainly seem to have taken the fatal +step beyond the sublime! It is to be presumed that Tory great ladies +invariably employed the services of a wet-nurse, and hence failed to +win the same tribute from the angel of the earth, who, usually, while +he guides + + "His chariot-planet round the goal of day, + All trembling gazes on the eye of God," + +but who on this occasion "a moment turned his awful face away" to gaze +approvingly on the high-born mother who had so conscientiously +performed her maternal duties. + +Very different is the tone of this poem from that of the two best known +of Coleridge's lighter contributions to the _Morning Post_. The +most successful of these, however, from the journalistic point of view, +is in a literary sense the less remarkable. One is indeed a little +astonished to find that a public, accustomed to such admirable political +satire as the _Anti-Jacobin_, should have been so much taken as it +seems to have been by the rough versification and somewhat clumsy sarcasm +of the _Devil's Thoughts_. The poem created something like a +_furore_, and sold a large reissue of the number of the _Morning +Post_ in which it appeared. Nevertheless it is from the metrical point +of view doggerel, as indeed the author admits, three of its most smoothly- +flowing stanzas being from the hand of Southey, while there is nothing in +its boisterous political drollery to put its composition beyond the reach +of any man of strong partisan feelings and a turn for street-humour. +_Fire Famine and Slaughter_, on the other hand, is literary in +every sense of the word, requiring indeed, and very urgently, to insist +on its character as literature, in order to justify itself against the +charge of inhuman malignity. Despite the fact that "letters four do +form his name," it is of course an idealised statesman, and not the +real flesh and blood Mr. Pitt, whom the sister furies, Fire, Famine, +and Slaughter, extol as their patron in these terrible lines. The poem +must be treated as what lawyers call an "A. B. case." Coleridge must be +supposed to be lashing certain alphabetical symbols arranged in a +certain order. This idealising process is perfectly easy and familiar +to everybody with the literary sense. The deduction for "poetic +license" is just as readily, though it does not, of course, require to +be as frequently, made with respect to the hyperbole of denunciation as +with respect to that of praise. Nor need we doubt that this deduction +had in fact been made by all intelligent readers long before that +agitating dinner at Mr. Sotheby's, which Coleridge describes with such +anxious gravity in his apologetic preface to the republication of the +lines. On the whole one may pretty safely accept De Quincey's view of +the true character of this incident as related by him in his own +inimitable fashion, namely, that it was in the nature of an elaborate +hoax, played off at the poet's expense. [3] The malice of the piece is, +as De Quincey puts it, quite obviously a "malice of the understanding +and fancy," and not of the heart. There is significance in the mere +fact that the poem was deliberately published by Coleridge two years +after its composition, when the vehemence of his political animosities +had much abated. Written in 1796, it did not appear in the _Morning +Post_ till January 1798. + +He was now, however, about to draw closer his connection with the +newspaper press. Soon after his return from Germany he was solicited +to "undertake the literary and political department in the _Morning +Post_," and acceded to the proposal "on condition that the paper +should thenceforward be conducted on certain fixed and announced +principles, and that he should be neither obliged nor requested to +deviate from them in favour of any party or any event." Accordingly, +from December 1799 until about midsummer of 1800, Coleridge became a +regular contributor of political articles to this journal, sometimes +to the number of two or three in one week. At the end of the period +of six months he quitted London, and his contributions became +necessarily less frequent, but they were continued (though with two +apparent breaks of many months in duration) [4] until the close of +the year 1802. It would seem, however, that nothing but Coleridge's +own disinclination prevented this connection from taking a +form in which it would have profoundly modified his whole future +career. In a letter to Mr. Poole, dated March 1800, he informs his +friend that if he "had the least love of money" he could "make sure of +L2000 a year, for that Stuart had offered him half shares in his two +papers, the _Morning Post_ and the _Courier_, if he would devote +himself to them in conjunction with their proprietor. But I told +him," he continues, "that I would not give up the country and the lazy +reading of old folios for two thousand times two thousand pounds,--in +short, that beyond L350 a year I considered money as a real evil." +Startlingly liberal as this offer will appear to the journalist, it +seems really to have been made. For, writing long afterwards to Mr. +Nelson Coleridge, Mr. Stuart says: "Could Coleridge and I place +ourselves thirty years back, and he be so far a man of business as to +write three or four hours a day, there is nothing I would not pay for +his assistance. I would take him into partnership, and I would enable +him to make a large fortune." Nor is there any reason to think that the +bargain would have been a bad one for the proprietor from the strictly +commercial point of view. Coleridge in later years may no doubt have +overrated the effect of his own contributions on the circulation of the +_Morning Post_, but it must have been beyond question considerable, +and would in all likelihood have become far greater if he could have +been induced to devote himself more closely to the work of journalism. +For the fact is--and it is a fact for which the current conception of +Coleridge's intellectual character does not altogether prepare one--that +he was a workman of the very first order of excellence in this curious +craft. The faculties which go to the attainment of such excellence are +not perhaps among the highest distinctions of the human mind, but, such +as they are, they are specific and well marked; they are by no means the +necessary accompaniments even of the most conspicuous literary power, +and they are likely rather to suffer than to profit by association with +great subtlety of intellect or wide philosophic grasp. It is not to the +advantage of the journalist, as such, that he should see too many +things at a time, or too far into any one thing, and even the gifts of +an active imagination and an abundant vocabulary are each of them +likely to prove a snare. To be wholly successful, the journalist--at +least the English journalist--must not be too eloquent, or too witty, +or too humorous, or too ingenious, or too profound. Yet the English +reader likes, or thinks he likes, eloquence; he has a keen sense of +humour, and a fair appreciation of wit; and he would be much hurt if he +were told that ingenuity and profundity were in themselves distasteful +to him. How, then, to give him enough of these qualities to please and +not enough to offend him--as much eloquence as will stir his emotions, +but not enough to arouse his distrust; as much wit as will carry home +the argument, but not enough to make him doubt its sincerity; as much +humour as will escape the charge of levity, as much ingenuity as can be +displayed without incurring suspicion, and as much profundity as may +impress without bewildering? This is a problem which is fortunately +simplified for most journalists by the fact of their possessing these +qualities in no more than, if in so much as, the minimum required. But +Coleridge, it must be remembered, possessed most of them in +embarrassing superfluity. Not all of them indeed, for, though he could +be witty and at times humorous, his temptations to excess in these +respects were doubtless not considerable. But as for his eloquence, he +was from his youth upwards _Isoo torrentior_, his dialectical +ingenuity was unequalled, and in disquisition of the speculative order +no man was so apt as he to penetrate more deeply into his subject than +most of his readers would care to follow him. _A priori_, +therefore, one would have expected that Coleridge's instincts would +have led him to rhetorise too much in his diction, to refine too much +in his arguments, and to philosophise too much in his reflections, to +have hit the popular taste as a journalist, and that at the age of +eight-and-twenty he would have been unable to subject these tendencies +either to the artistic repression of the maturer writer or to the +tactical restraints of the trained advocate. This eminently natural +assumption, however, is entirely rebutted by the facts. Nothing is more +remarkable in Coleridge's contributions to the _Morning Post_ than +their thoroughly workmanlike character from the journalistic point of +view, their avoidance of "viewiness," their strict adherence to the one +or two simple points which he is endeavouring at any particular +juncture in politics to enforce upon his readers, and the steadiness +with which he keeps his own and his readers' attention fixed on the +special political necessities of the hour. His articles, in short, +belong to that valuable class to which, while it gives pleasure to the +cultivated reader, the most commonplace and Philistine man of business +cannot refuse the to him supreme praise of being eminently "practical." +They hit the nail on the head in nearly every case, and they take the +plainest and most direct route to their point, dealing in rhetoric and +metaphor only so far as the strictly "business" ends of the argument +appear to require. Nothing, for instance, could have been better done, +better reasoned and written, more skilfully adapted throughout to the +English taste, than Coleridge's criticism (3lst Dec. 1799) on the new +constitution established by Bonaparte and Sieyes on the foundation of +the Consulate, with its eighty senators, the "creatures of a renegade +priest, himself the creature of a foreign mercenary, its hundred +tribunes who are to talk and do nothing, and its three hundred +legislators whom the constitution orders to be silent." What a +ludicrous Purgatory, adds he, "for three hundred Frenchmen!" Very +vigorous, moreover, is he on the ministerial rejection of the French +proposals of peace in 1800, arguing against the continuance of the war +on the very sound anti-Jacobin ground that if it were unsuccessful it +would inflame French ambition anew, and, if successful, repeat the +experience of the results of rendering France desperate, and simply +reanimate Jacobinism. + +Effective enough too, for the controversial needs of the moment, +was the argument that if France were known, as Ministers pretended, +to be insincere in soliciting peace, "Ministers would certainly treat +with her, since they would again secure the support of the British +people in the war, and expose the ambition of the enemy;" and that, +therefore, the probability was that the British Government knew +France to be sincere, and shrank from negotiation lest it should +expose their own desire to prosecute the war. [5] Most happy, again, +is his criticism of Lord Grenville's note, with its references +to the unprovoked aggression of France (in the matter of the opening of +the Scheldt, etc.) as the sole cause and origin of the war. "If this +were indeed true, in what ignorance must not Mr. Pitt and Mr. Windham +have kept the poor Duke of Portland, who declared in the House of Lords +that the cause of the war was the maintenance of the Christian +religion?" + +To add literary excellence of the higher order to the peculiar +qualities which give force to the newspaper article is for a +journalist, of course, a "counsel of perfection;" but it remains to be +remarked that Coleridge did make this addition in a most conspicuous +manner. Mrs. H. N. Coleridge's three volumes of her father's _Essays +on his own Times_ deserve to live as literature apart altogether +from their merits as journalism. Indeed among the articles in the +_Morning Post_ between 1799 and 1802 may be found some of the +finest specimens of Coleridge's maturer prose style. The character of +Pitt, which appeared on 19th March 1800, is as remarkable for its +literary merits as it is for the almost humorous political perversity +which would not allow the Minister any single merit except that which +he owed to the sedulous rhetorical training received by him from his +father, viz. "a premature and unnatural dexterity in the combination of +words." [6] The letters to Fox, again, though a little artificialised +perhaps by reminiscences of Junius, are full of weight and dignity. But +by far the most piquant illustration of Coleridge's peculiar power is +to be found in the comparison between his own version of Pitt's speech +of 17th February 1800, on the continuance of the war, with the report +of it which appeared in the _Times_ of that date. With the +exception of a few unwarranted elaborations of the arguments here and +there, the two speeches are in substance identical; but the effect of +the contrast between the minister's cold state-paper periods and the +life and glow of the poet-journalist's style is almost comic. Mr. +Gillman records that Canning, calling on business at the editor's, +inquired, as others had done, who was the reporter of the speech for +the _Morning Post_, and, on being told, remarked drily that the +report "did more credit to his head than to his memory." + +On the whole one can well understand Mr. Stuart's anxiety to secure +Coleridge's permanent collaboration with him in the business of +journalism; and it would be possible to maintain, with less of paradox +than may at first sight appear, that it would have been better not only +for Coleridge himself but for the world at large if the editor's efforts +had been successful. It would indeed have been bowing the neck to the +yoke; but there are some natures upon which constraint of that sort +exercises not a depressing but a steadying influence. What, after all, +would the loss in hours devoted to a comparatively inferior class of +literary labour have amounted to when compared with the gain in much- +needed habits of method and regularity, and--more valuable than all to +an intellect like Coleridge's,--in the constant reminder that human +life is finite and the materials of human speculation infinite, and +that even a world-embracing mind must apportion its labour to its day? +There is, however, the great question of health to be considered-- +_the_ question, as every one knows, of Coleridge's whole career and +life. If health was destined to give way, in any event--if its +collapse, in fact, was simply the cause of all the lamentable external +results which followed it, while itself due only to predetermined +internal conditions over which the sufferer had no control--then to be +sure _cadit qu'stio_. At London or at the Lakes, among newspaper +files or old folios, Coleridge's life would in that case have run the +same sad course; and his rejection of Mr. Stuart's offer becomes a +matter of no particular interest to disappointed posterity. But be that +as it may, the "old folios" won the day. In the summer of 1800 Coleridge +quitted London, and having wound up his affairs at his then place of +residence, removed with his wife and children to a new and beautiful +home in that English Lake country with which his name was destined, +like those of Southey and Wordsworth, to be enduringly associated. + + +FOOTNOTES + +1. De Quincey's error, in supposing that Coleridge's visit to Germany +to "complete his education" was made at an earlier date than this +journey with the Wordsworths, is a somewhat singular mistake for one so +well acquainted with the facts of Coleridge's life. Had we not his own +statement that this of 1798 was the first occasion of his quitting his +native country, it so happens that we can account in England for nearly +every month of his time from his leaving Cambridge until this date. + + +2. It has only within a comparatively recent period been ascertained +that the visit of the Wordsworths to Germany was itself another result +of Thomas Wedgwood's generous appreciation of literary merit. It +appears, on the incontrovertible testimony of the Wedgwoods' accounts +with their agents at Hamburg, that the expenses of all three travellers +were defrayed by their friend at home. The credits opened for them +amounted, during the course of their stay abroad, to some L260.--Miss +Meteyard's _A Group of Englishmen_, p. 99. + +3. After quoting the +two concluding lines of the poem, "Fire's" rebuke of her inconstant +sisters, in the words + + "I alone am faithful, I + Cling to him everlastingly," + +De Quincey proceeds: "The sentiment is diabolical; and the question +argued at the London dinner-table (Mr. Sotheby's) was 'Could the writer +have been other than a devil?'... Several of the great guns among the +literary body were present--in particular Sir Walter Scott, and he, we +believe, with his usual good nature, took the apologetic side of the +dispute; in fact, he was in the secret. Nobody else, barring the +author, knew at first whose good name was at stake. The scene must have +been high. The company kicked about the poor diabolic writer's head as +though it had been a tennis-ball. Coleridge, the yet unknown criminal, +absolutely perspired and fumed in pleading for the defendant; the +company demurred; the orator grew urgent; wits began to smoke the case +as an active verb, the advocate to smoke as a neuter verb; the 'fun +grew fast and furious,' until at length the delinquent arose, burning +tears in his eyes, and confessed to an audience now bursting with +stifled laughter (but whom he supposed to be bursting with fiery +indignation), 'Lo, I am he that wrote it.'" + +4. _Sic_ in _Essays on his own Times_ by S. T. C., the +collection of her father's articles made by Mrs. Nelson (Sara) +Coleridge; but without attributing strange error to Coleridge's own +estimate (in the _Biographia Literaria_) of the amount of his +journalistic work, it is impossible to believe that this collection, +forming as it does but two small volumes, and a portion of a third, is +anything like complete. + +5. Alas, that the facts should be so merciless to the most excellent +arguments! Coleridge could not foresee that Napoleon would, years +afterwards, admit in his own Memoirs the insincerity of his +overtures. "I had need of war; a treaty of peace...would have +withered every imagination." And when Mr. Pitt's answer arrived, +"it filled me with a secret satisfaction." + +6. The following passage, too, is curious as showing how polemics, like +history, repeat themselves. "As his reasonings were, so is his +eloquence. One character pervades his whole being. Words on words, +finely arranged, and so dexterously consequent that the whole bears the +semblance of argument and still keeps awake a sense of surprise; but, +when all is done, nothing rememberable has been said; no one +philosophical remark, no one image, not even a pointed aphorism. Not a +sentence of Mr. Pitt's has ever been quoted, or formed the favourite +phrase of the day--a thing unexampled in any man of equal reputation." +With the alteration of one word--the proper name--this passage might +have been taken straight from some political diatribe of to-day. + + + + +CHAPTER V. + +Life at Keswick--Second part of _Christabel_--Failing health--Resort +to opium--The _Ode to Dejection_--Increasing restlessness--Visit to Malta. + +[1800-1804.] + + +We are now approaching the turning-point, moral and physical, of +Coleridge's career. The next few years determined not only his destiny +as a writer but his life as a man. Between his arrival at Keswick in +the summer of 1800 and his departure for Malta in the spring of 1804 +that fatal change of constitution, temperament, and habits which +governed the whole of his subsequent history had fully established +itself. Between these two dates he was transformed from the Coleridge +of whom his young fellow-students in Germany have left us so pleasing a +picture into the Coleridge whom distressed kinsmen, alienated friends, +and a disappointed public were to have before them for the remainder of +his days. Here, then, at Keswick, and in these first two or three years +of the century--here or nowhere is the key to the melancholy mystery to +be found. + +It is probable that only those who have gone with some +minuteness into the facts of this singular life are aware how great was +the change effected during this very short period of time. When +Coleridge left London for the Lake country he had not completed his +eight-and-twentieth year. Before he was thirty he wrote that _Ode to +Dejection_ in which his spiritual and moral losses are so +pathetically bewailed. His health and spirits, his will and habits, may +not have taken any unalterable bent for the worse until 1804, the year +of his departure for Malta--the date which I have thought it safest to +assign as the definitive close of the earlier and happier period of his +life; but undoubtedly the change had fully manifested itself more than +two years before. And a very great and painful one it assuredly was. We +know from the recorded evidence of Dr. Carrlyon and others that +Coleridge was full of hope and gaiety, full of confidence in himself +and of interest in life during his few months' residence in Germany. +The _annus mirabilis_ of his poetic life was but two years behind +him, and his achievements of 1797-98 seemed to him but a mere earnest +of what he was destined to accomplish. His powers of mental +concentration were undiminished, as his student days at Gottingen +sufficiently proved; his conjugal and family affections, as Dr. +Carrlyon notes for us, were still unimpaired; his own verse gives signs +of a home-sickness and a yearning for his own fireside which were in +melancholy contrast with the restlessness of his later years. Nay, even +after his return to England, and during the six months of his regular +work on the _Morning Post_, the vigour of his political articles +entirely negatives the idea that any relaxation of intellectual energy +had as yet set in. Yet within six months of his leaving London for +Keswick there begins a progressive decline in Coleridge's literary +activity in every form. The second part of _Christabel_, beautiful +but inferior to the first, was composed in the autumn of 1800, and for +the next two years, so far as the higher forms of literature are +concerned, "the rest is silence." The author of the prefatory memoir in +the edition of Coleridge's _Poetical and Dramatic Works_ (1880), +enumerates some half-dozen slight pieces contributed to the _Morning +Post_ in 1801, but declares that Coleridge's poetical contributions +to this paper during 1802 were "very rich and varied, and included the +magnificent ode entitled _Dejection_." Only the latter clause of +this statement is entitled, I think, to command our assent. Varied +though the list may be, it is hardly to be described as "rich." It +covers only about seven weeks in the autumn of 1802, and, with the +exception of the _Lovers' Resolution_ and the "magnificent ode" +referred to, the pieces are of the shortest and slightest kind. Nor is +it accurate to say that the "political articles of the same period were +also numerous and important." On the contrary, it would appear from an +examination of Mrs. H. N. Coleridge's collection that her father's +contributions to the _Post_ between his departure from London and +the autumn of 1802 were few and intermittent, and in August 1803 the +proprietorship of that journal passed out of Mr. Stuart's hands. It is, +in short, I think, impossible to doubt that very shortly after his +migration to the Lake country he practically ceased not only to write +poetry but to produce any mentionable quantity of _complete_ work +in the prose form. His mind, no doubt, was incessantly active +throughout the whole of the deplorable period upon which we are now +entering; but it seems pretty certain that its activity was not poetic +nor even critical, but purely philosophical, and that the products of +that activity went exclusively to _marginalia_ and the pages of +note-books. + +Yet unfortunately we have almost no evidence, personal or +other, from which we can with any certainty construct the +psychological--if one should not rather say the physiological, or +better still, perhaps, the pathological--history of this cardinal epoch +in Coleridge's life. Miss Wordsworth's diary is nearly silent about him +for the next few years; he was living indeed some dozen miles from her +brother at Grasmere, and they could not therefore have been in daily +intercourse. Southey did not come to the Lakes till 1803, and the +records of his correspondence only begin therefore from that date. Mr. +Cottle's _Reminiscences_ are here a blank; Charles Lamb's +correspondence yields little; and though De Quincey has plenty to say +about this period in his characteristic fashion, it must have been +based upon pure gossip, as he cites no authorities, and did not himself +make Coleridge's acquaintance till six years afterwards. This, however, +is at least certain, that his gloomy accounts of his own health begin +from a period at which his satisfaction with his new abode was still as +fresh as ever. The house which he had taken, now historic as the +residence of two famous Englishmen, enjoyed a truly beautiful situation +and the command of a most noble view. It stood in the vale of +Derwentwater, on the bank of the river Greta, and about a mile from the +lake. When Coleridge first entered it, it was uncompleted, and an +arrangement was made by which, after completion, it was to be divided +between the tenant and the landlord, a Mr. Jackson. As it turned out, +however, the then completed portion was shared by them in common, the +other portion, and eventually the whole, being afterwards occupied by +Southey. In April 1801, some eight or nine months after his taking +possession of Greta Hall, Coleridge thus describes it to its future +occupant:-- + +"Our house stands on a low hill, the whole front of which +is one field and an enormous garden, nine-tenths of which is a nursery +garden. Behind the house is an orchard and a small wood on a steep +slope, at the foot of which is the river Greta, which winds round and +catches the evening's light in the front of the house. In front we have +a giant camp--an encamped army of tent-like mountains which, by an +inverted arch, gives a view of another vale. On our right the lovely +vale and the wedge-shaped lake of Bassenthwaite; and on our left +Derwentwater and Lodore full in view, and the fantastic mountains of +Borrowdale. Behind is the massy Skiddaw, smooth, green, high, with two +chasms and a tent-like ridge in the larger. A fairer scene you have not +seen in all your wanderings." + +There is here no note of discontent with +the writer's surroundings; and yet, adds Mr. Cuthbert Southey in his +_Life and Correspondence_ of his father, the remainder of this +letter was filled by Coleridge with "a most gloomy account of his +health." Southey writes him in reply that he is convinced that his +friend's "complaint is gouty, that good living is necessary and a good +climate." In July of the same year he received a visit from Southey at +Greta Hall, and one from Charles and Mary Lamb in the following summer, +and it is probable that during such intervals of pleasurable excitement +his health and spirits might temporarily rally. But henceforward and +until his departure for Malta we gather nothing from any source as to +Coleridge's _normal_ condition of body and mind which is not +unfavourable, and it is quite certain that he had long before 1804 +enslaved himself to that fatal drug which was to remain his tyrant for +the rest of his days. + +When, then, and how did this slavery begin? What +was the precise date of Coleridge's first experiences of opium, and +what the original cause of his taking it? Within what time did its use +become habitual? To what extent was the decline of his health the +effect of the evil habit, and to what, if any, extent its cause? And +how far, if at all, can the deterioration of his character and powers +be attributed to a decay of physical constitution, brought about by +influences beyond the sufferer's own control? + +Could every one of these questions be completely answered, we should be +in a position to solve the very obscure and painful problem before us; +but though some of them can be answered with more or less approach to +completeness, there is only one of them which can be finally disposed +of. It is certain, and it is no doubt matter for melancholy +satisfaction to have ascertained it, that Coleridge first had +recourse to opium as an anodyne. It was Nature's revolt from pain, and +not her appetite for pleasure, which drove him to the drug; and though +De Quincey, with his almost comical malice, remarks that, though +Coleridge began in the desire to obtain relief "there is no proof that +he did not end in voluptuousness," there is on the other hand no proof +whatever that he did so end--_until the habit was formed_. It is +quite consistent with probability, and only accords with Coleridge's +own express affirmations, to believe that it was the medicinal efficacy +of opium, and this quality of it alone, which induced him to resort to +it again and again until his senses contracted that well-known and +insatiable craving for the peculiar excitement, "voluptuous" only to +the initiated, which opium-intoxication creates. But let Coleridge +speak on this point for himself. Writing in April 1826 he says:-- + +"I wrote a few stanzas three-and-twenty years ago, soon after my eyes +had been opened to the true nature of the habit into which I had been +ignorantly deluded by the seeming magic effects of opium, in the +sudden removal of a supposed rheumatic affection, attended with +swellings in my knees and palpitation of the heart and pains all over +me, by which I had been bed-ridden for nearly six months. Unhappily +among my neighbours' and landlord's books were a large number of +medical reviews and magazines. I had always a fondness (a common case, +but most mischievous turn with reading men who are at all dyspeptic) +for dabbling in medical writings; and in one of these reviews I met a +case which I fancied very like my own, in which a cure had been +effected by the Kendal Black Drop. In an evil hour I procured it: it +worked miracles--the swellings disappeared, the pains vanished. I was +all alive, and all around me being as ignorant as myself, nothing +could exceed my triumph. I talked of nothing else, prescribed the +newly-discovered panacea for all complaints, and carried a little +about with me not to lose any opportunity of administering 'instant +relief and speedy cure' to all complainers, stranger or friend, gentle +or simple. Alas! it is with a bitter smile, a laugh of gall and +bitterness, that I recall this period of unsuspecting delusion, and +how I first became aware of the Maelstrom, the fatal whirlpool to +which I was drawing, just when the current was beyond my strength to +stem. The state of my mind is truly portrayed in the following +effusion, for God knows! that from that time I was the victim of pain +and terror, nor had I at any time taken the flattering poison as a +stimulus or for any craving after pleasurable sensation." + +The "effusion" in question has parted company with the autobiographical +note, and the author of the prefatory memoir above quoted conjectures +it to have been a little poem entitled the _Visionary Hope_; but I am +myself of opinion, after a careful study of both pieces, that it is +more probably the _Pains of Sleep_, which moreover is known to +have been written in 1803. But whichever it be, its date is fixed in +that year by the statement in the autobiographical note of 1826 that +the stanzas referred to in it were written "twenty-three years ago." +Thus, then, we have the two facts established, that the opium-taking +habit had its origin in a bodily ailment, and that at some time in +1803 that habit had become confirmed. The disastrous experiment in +amateur therapeutics, which was the means of implanting it, could not +have taken place, according to the autobiographical note, until at +least six months after Coleridge's arrival at Keswick, and perhaps not +for some months later yet. At any rate, it seems tolerably certain +that it was not till the spring of 1801, when the climate of the +Lake country first began to tell unfavourably on his health, that +the "Kendal Black Drop" was taken. Possibly it may have been about +the time (April 1801) when he wrote the letter to Southey which has +been quoted above, and which, it will be remembered, contained "so +gloomy an account of his health." How painfully ailing he was at this +time we know from a variety of sources, from some of which we also +gather that he must have been a sufferer in more or less serious +forms from his boyhood upwards. Mr. Gillman, for instance, who speaks +on this point with the twofold authority of confidant and medical +expert, records a statement of Coleridge's to the effect that, as a +result of such schoolboy imprudences as "swimming over the New River +in my clothes and remaining in them, full half the time from seventeen +to eighteen was passed by me in the sick ward of Christ's Hospital, +afflicted with jaundice and rheumatic fever." From these +indiscretions and their consequences "may be dated," Mr. Gillman +thinks, "all his bodily sufferings in future life." That he was a +martyr to periodical attacks of rheumatism for some years before his +migration to Keswick is a conclusion resting upon something more than +conjecture. The _Ode to the Departing Year_ (1796) was written, as +he has himself told us, under a severe attack of rheumatism in the +head. In 1797 he describes himself in ill health, and as forced to +retire on that account to the "lonely farmhouse between Porlock and +London on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire," where +_Kubla Khan_ was written. [1] + +Thus much is, moreover, certain, +that whatever were Coleridge's health and habits during the first two +years of his residence at Keswick, his career as a poet--that is to +say, as a poet of the first order--was closed some months before that +period had expired. The ode entitled _Dejection_, to which +reference has so often been made, was written on the 4th of April 1802, +and the evidential importance which attaches, in connection with the +point under inquiry, to this singularly pathetic utterance has been +almost universally recognised. Coleridge has himself cited its most +significant passage in the _Biographia Literaria_ as supplying the +best description of his mental state at the time when it was written. +De Quincey quotes it with appropriate comments in his _Coleridge and +Opium-Eating_. Its testimony is reverently invoked by the poet's son +in the introductory essay prefixed by him to his edition of his +father's works. The earlier stanzas are, however, so necessary to the +comprehension of Coleridge's mood at this time that a somewhat long +extract must be made. In the opening stanza he expresses a longing that +the storm which certain atmospheric signs of a delusively calm evening +appear to promise might break forth, so that + + "Those sounds which oft have raised me, whilst they awed, + And sent my soul abroad, + Might now perhaps their wonted impulse give, + Might startle this dull pain, and make it move and live." + +And thus, with ever-deepening sadness, the poem proceeds: + + "A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear, + A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief, + Which finds no natural outlet, no relief, + In word, or sigh, or tear-- + O Lady! in this wan and heartless mood, + To other thoughts by yonder throstle woo'd, + All this long eve, so balmy and serene, + Have I been gazing on the western sky, + And its peculiar tint of yellow green: + And still I gaze--and with how blank an eye! + And those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars, + That give away their motion to the stars; + Those stars, that glide behind them or between, + Now sparkling, now bedimmed, but always seen: + Yon crescent Moon as fixed as if it grew + In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue; + I see them all so excellently fair, + I see, not feel how beautiful they are! + + "My genial spirits fail, + And what can these avail + To lift the smothering weight from off my breast? + It were a vain endeavour, + Though I should gaze for ever + On that green light that lingers in the west: + I may not hope from outward forms to win + The passion and the life, whose fountains are within. + + "O Lady! we receive but what we give, + And in our life alone does nature live: + Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud! + And would we aught behold, of higher worth, + Than that inanimate cold world allowed + To the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd, + Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth, + A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud + Enveloping the earth-- + And from the soul itself must there be sent + A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth, + Of all sweet sounds the life and element! + + "O pure of heart! thou need'st not ask of me + What this strong music in the soul may be! + What, and wherein it doth exist, + This light, this glory, this fair luminous mist, + This beautiful and beauty-making power. + Joy, virtuous Lady! Joy that ne'er was given, + Save to the pure, and in their purest hour, + Life, and Life's effluence, cloud at once and shower, + Joy, Lady! is the spirit and the power, + Which, wedding Nature to us, gives in dower + A new Earth and new Heaven, + Undreamt of by the sensual and the proud-- + Joy is the sweet voice, Joy the luminous cloud-- + We in ourselves rejoice! + And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight, + All melodies the echoes of that voice, + All colours a suffusion from that light." + +And then follows the much quoted, profoundly touching, deeply significant +stanza to which we have referred:-- + + "There was a time when, though my path was rough, + This joy within me dallied with distress, + And all misfortunes were but as the stuff + Whence Fancy made me dreams of happiness: + For hope grew round me, like the twining vine, + And fruits, and foliage, not my own, seemed mine. + But now afflictions how me down to earth: + Nor care I that they rob me of my mirth, + But O! each visitation + Suspends what nature gave me at my birth, + My shaping spirit of Imagination. + For not to think of what I needs must feel, + But to be still and patient, all I can; + And haply by abstruse research to steal + From my own nature all the natural Man-- + This was my sole resource, my only plan: + Till that which suits a part infects the whole, + And now is almost grown the habit of my Soul." + +Sadder lines than these were never perhaps written by any poet in +description of his own feelings. And what gives them their peculiar +sadness--as also, of course, their special biographical value--is that +they are not, like Shelley's similarly entitled stanzas, the mere +expression of a passing mood. They are the record of a life change, a +veritable threnody over a spiritual death. For there can be no doubt-- +his whole subsequent history goes to show it--that Coleridge's "shaping +spirit of Imagination" was in fact dead when these lines were written. +To a man of stronger moral fibre a renascence of the poetical instinct +in other forms might, as I have suggested above, been possible; but the +poet of _Christabel_ and the _Ancient Mariner_ was dead. The +metaphysician had taken his place, and was striving, in abstruse +research, to live in forgetfulness of the loss. Little more, that is to +say, than a twelvemonth after the composition of the second part of +_Christabel_ the impulse which gave birth to it had passed away +for ever. Opium-taking had doubtless begun by this time--may +conceivably indeed have begun nearly a year before--and the mere +_mood_ of the poem, the temporary phase of feeling which directed +his mind inwards into deeper reflections on its permanent state, is no +doubt strongly suggestive, in its excessive depression, of the terrible +reaction which is known to follow upon opium-excitement. But, I +confess, it seems to me improbable that even the habitual use of the +stimulant for so comparatively short a time as twelve months could have +produced so profound a change in Coleridge's intellectual nature. I +cannot but think that De Quincey overstates the case in declaring that +"opium killed Coleridge as a poet," though it may well be that, after +the collapse of health, which appears to me to have been the real +_causa causans_ in the matter, had killed the poet as we know him, +opium prevented his resurrection in another and it may be but little +inferior form. On the whole, in fact, the most probable account of this +all-important era in Coleridge's life appears to me to be this: that in +the course of 1801, as he was approaching his thirtieth year, a +distinct change for the worse--precipitated possibly, as Mr. Gillman +thinks, by the climate of his new place of abode--took place in his +constitution; that his rheumatic habit of body, and the dyspeptic +trouble by which it was accompanied became confirmed; and that the +severe attacks of the acute form of the malady which he underwent +produced such a permanent lowering of his vitality and animal spirits +as, _first_, to extinguish the creative impulse, and _then_ +to drive him to the physical anodyne of opium and to the mental +stimulant of metaphysics. + +From the summer of 1801, at any rate, his _malaise_, both of mind +and body, appears to have grown apace. Repeated letters from Southey +allow us to see how deeply concerned he was at this time about his +friend's condition. Plans of foreign travel are discussed between +them, and Southey endeavours in vain to spur his suffering and +depressed correspondent to "the assertion of his supremacy" in some +new literary work. But, with the exception of his occasional +contributions to the press, whatever he committed to paper +during these years exists only, if at all, in a fragmentary form. And +his restlessness, continually on the increase, appears by the end of +1802 to have become ungovernable. In November of that year he eagerly +accepted an offer from Thomas Wedgwood to become his companion on a +tour, and he spent this and the greater part of the following month in +South Wales with some temporary advantage, it would seem, to his health +and spirits. "Coleridge," writes Mr. Wedgwood to a friend, "is all +kindness to me, and in prodigious favour here. He is quite easy, +cheerful, and takes great pains to make himself pleasant. He is +willing, indeed desirous, to accompany me to any part of the globe." +"Coll and I," he writes on another occasion, the abbreviation of name +having been suggested to him by Coleridge himself, "harmonise +amazingly," and adds that his companion "takes long rambles, and writes +a great deal." But the fact that such changes of air and scene produced +no permanent effect upon the invalid after his return to his own home +appears to show that now, at any rate, his fatal habit had obtained a +firm hold upon him. And his "writing a great deal resulted" only in the +filling of many note-books, and perhaps the sketching out of many of +those vast schemes of literary labour of which he was destined to leave +so remarkable a collection at his death. One such we find him +forwarding to Southey in the August of 1803--the plan of a Bibliotheca +Britannica, or "History of British Literature, bibliographical, +biographical, and critical," in eight volumes. The first volume was to +contain a "complete history of all Welsh, Saxon, and Erse books that +are not translations, but the native growth of Britain;" to accomplish +which, writes Coleridge, "I will with great pleasure join you in +learning Welsh and Erse." The second volume was to contain the history +of English poetry and poets, including "all prose truly poetical." The +third volume "English prose, considered as to style, as to eloquence, +as to general impressiveness; a history of styles and manners, their +causes, their birthplace and parentage, their analysis." The fourth +volume would take up "the history of metaphysics, theology, medicine, +alchemy; common, canon, and Roman law from Alfred to Henry VII." The +fifth would "carry on metaphysics and ethics to the present day in the +first half, and comprise in the second half the theology of all the +reformers." In the sixth and seventh volumes were to be included "all +the articles you (Southey) can get on all the separate arts and +sciences that have been treated of in books since the Reformation; and +by this time," concludes the enthusiastic projector, "the book, if it +answered at all, would have gained so high a reputation that you need +not fear having whom you liked to write the different articles-- +medicine, surgery, chemistry, etc.; navigation, travellers' voyages, +etc., etc." There is certainly a melancholy humour in the formulation +of so portentous a scheme by a man who was at this moment wandering +aimlessly among the lakes and mountains, unable to settle down to any +definite piece of literary work, or even to throw off a fatal habit, +which could not fail, if persevered in, to destroy all power of steady +application in the future. That neither the comic nor the pathetic +element in the situation was lost upon Southey is evident from his +half-sad, half-satirical, wholly winning reply. "Your plan," he writes, +"is too good, too gigantic, quite beyond my powers. If you had my +tolerable state of health and that love of steady and productive +employment which is now grown into a necessary habit with me, if you +were to execute and would execute it, it would be beyond all doubt the +most valuable work of any age or any country; but I cannot fill up such +an outline. No man can better feel where he fails than I do, and to +rely upon you for whole quartos! Dear Coleridge, the smile that comes +with that thought is a very melancholy one; and if Edith saw me now she +would think my eyes were weak again, when in truth the humour that +covers them springs from another cause." A few weeks after this +interchange of correspondence Coleridge was once again to prove how far +he was from possessing Southey's "tolerable state of health." +Throughout the whole of this year he had been more restless than ever. +In January 1803 we find him staying with Southey at Bristol, "suffering +terribly from the climate, and talking of going abroad." A week later +he is at Stowey, planning schemes, not destined to be realised, of +foreign travel with Wedgwood. Returning again to Keswick, he started, +after a few months' quiescence, on 15th August, in company with +Wordsworth and his sister, for a tour in Scotland, but after a +fortnight he found himself too ill to proceed. The autumn rains set in, +and "poor Coleridge," writes Miss Wordsworth, "being very unwell, +determined to send his clothes to Edinburgh, and make the best of his +way thither, being afraid to face much wet weather in an open +carriage." It is possible, however, that his return to Keswick may have +been hastened by the circumstance that Southey, who had paid a brief +visit to the Lake country two years before, was expected in a few days +at the house which was destined to be his abode for the longest portion +of his life. He arrived at Greta Hall on 7th September 1803, and from +time to time during the next six months his correspondence gives us +occasional glimpses of Coleridge's melancholy state. At the end of +December, his health growing steadily worse, he conceived the project +of a voyage to Madeira, and quitted Keswick with the intention, after +paying a short visit to the Wordsworths, of betaking himself to London +to make preparations. His stay at Grasmere, however, was longer than he +had counted on. "He was detained for a month by a severe attack of +illness, induced, if his description is to be relied on, by the use of +narcotics. [2] Unsuspicious of the cause, Mrs. and Miss Wordsworth +nursed him with the tenderest affection, while the poet himself, +usually a parsimonious man, forced upon him, to use Coleridge's own +words, a hundred pounds in the event of his going to Madeira, and his +friend Stuart offered to befriend him." From Grasmere he went to +Liverpool, where he spent a pleasant week with his old Unitarian +friend, Dr. Crompton, and arrived in London at the close of 1803. Here, +however, his plans were changed. Malta was substituted for Madeira, in +response to an invitation from his friend Mr., afterwards Sir John, +Stoddart, then resident as judge in the Mediterranean island. By 12th +March, as we gather from the Southey correspondence, the change of +arrangements had been made. Two days afterwards he receives a letter of +valediction from his "old friend and brother" at Greta Hall, and on 2d +April 1804, he sailed from England in the _Speedwell_, dropping +anchor sixteen days later in Valetta harbour. + + +FOOTNOTES + +1. Were it not for Coleridge's express statement that he first took +opium at Keswick, one would be inclined to attribute the gorgeous but +formless imagery of that poem to the effects of the stimulant. It is +certainly very like a metrical version of one of the pleasant variety +of opium-dreams described in De Quincey's poetic prose. + +2. See Miss Meteyard (_A Group of Englishmen_, p. 223). Her +evidence, however, on any point otherwise doubtful in Coleridge's +history should be received with caution, as her estimate of the poet +certainly errs somewhat on the side of excessive harshness. + + + + +CHAPTER VI + +Stay at Malta--Its injurious effects--Return to England--Meeting +with De Quincey--Residence in London--First series of lectures. + +[1806-1809.] + + +Never was human being destined so sadly and signally to illustrate the +_coelum non animum_ aphorism as the unhappy passenger on the +_Speedwell_. Southey shall describe his condition when he left +England; and his own pathetic lines to William Wordsworth will picture +him to us on his return. "You are in great measure right about +Coleridge," writes the former to his friend Rickman, "he is worse in +body than you seem to believe; but the main cause lies in his own +management of himself, or rather want of management. His mind is in a +perpetual St. Vitus's dance--eternal activity without action. At times +he feels mortified that he should have done so little, but this feeling +never produces any exertion. 'I will begin to-morrow,' he says, and +thus he has been all his lifelong letting to-day slip. He has had no +heavy calamities in life, and so contrives to be miserable about +trifles. Poor fellow, there is no one thing which gives me so much pain +as the witnessing such a waste of unequalled powers." Then, after +recalling the case of a highly promising schoolfellow, who had made +shipwreck of his life, and whom "a few individuals only remember with a +sort of horror and affection, which just serves to make them melancholy +whenever they think of him or mention his name," he adds: "This will +not be the case with Coleridge; the _disjecta membra_ will be +found if he does not die early: but having so much to do, so many +errors to weed out of the world which he is capable of eradicating, if +he does die without doing his work, it would half break my heart, for +no human being has had more talents allotted." Such being his closest +friend's account of him, and knowing, as we now do (what Southey +perhaps had no suspicion of at the time), the chief if not the sole or +original cause of his morally nerveless condition, it is impossible not +to feel that he did the worst possible thing for himself in taking this +journey to Malta. In quitting England he cut himself off from those +last possibilities of self-conquest which the society and counsels of +his friends might otherwise have afforded him, and the consequences +were, it is to be feared, disastrous. After De Quincey's incredibly +cool assertion that it was "notorious that Coleridge began the use of +opium, not as a relief from any bodily pain or nervous irritations, +since his constitution was strong and excellent(!), but as a source of +luxurious sensations," we must receive anything which he has to say on +this particular point with the utmost caution; but there is only too +much plausibility in his statement that, Coleridge being necessarily +thrown, while at Malta, "a good deal upon his own resources in the +narrow society of a garrison, he there confirmed and cherished ... his +habit of taking opium in large quantities." Contrary to his +expectations, moreover, the Maltese climate failed to benefit him. At +first, indeed, he did experience some feeling of relief, but +afterwards, according to Mr. Gillman, he spoke of his rheumatic limbs +as "lifeless tools," and of the "violent pains in his bowels, which +neither opium, ether, nor peppermint combined could relieve." + +Occupation, however, was not wanting to him, if occupation +could have availed in the then advanced stage of his case. He early +made the acquaintance of the governor of the island, Sir Alexander +Ball, who, having just lost his secretary by death, requested Cole- +ridge to undertake that official's duties until his successor should be +appointed. By this arrangement the governor and the public service in +all likelihood profited more than the provisional secretary; for +Coleridge's literary abilities proved very serviceable in the +department of diplomatic correspondence. The dignities of the office, +Mr. Gillman tells us, no doubt on Coleridge's own authority, "he never +attempted to support; he was greatly annoyed at what he thought its +unnecessary parade, and he petitioned Sir Alexander Ball to be relieved +from it." The purely mechanical duties of the post, too, appear to have +troubled him. He complains, in one of the journals which he kept during +this period, of having been "for months past incessantly employed in +official tasks, subscribing, examining, administering oaths, auditing, +etc." On the whole it would seem that the burden of his secretarial +employment, though doubtless it would have been found light enough by +any one accustomed to public business, was rather a weariness to the +flesh than a distraction to the mind; while in the meantime a new +symptom of disorder--a difficulty of breathing, to which he was always +afterwards subject--began to manifest itself in his case. Probably he +was glad enough--relieved, in more than one sense of the word--when, in +the autumn of 1805, the new secretary arrived at Malta to take his +place. + +On 27th September Coleridge quitted the island on his homeward +journey _via_ Italy, stopping for a short time at Syracuse on his +way. At Naples, which he reached on the 15th of December, he made a +longer stay, and in Rome his sojourn lasted some months. Unfortunately, +for a reason which will presently appear, there remains no written +record of his impressions of the Eternal City; and though Mr. Gillman +assures us that the gap is "partly filled by his own verbal account, +repeated at various times to the writer of this memoir," the public of +to-day is only indebted to "the writer of this memoir" for the not very +startling information that Coleridge, "while in Rome, was actively +employed in visiting the great works of art, statues, pictures, +buildings, palaces, etc. etc., observations on which he minuted down +for publication." It is somewhat more interesting to learn that he made +the acquaintance of many literary and artistic notabilities at that +time congregated there, including Tieck, the German poet and novelist, +and the American painter Alston, to whose skill we owe what is reputed +to be the best of his many not easily reconcilable portraits. The loss +of his Roman memoranda was indirectly brought about by a singular +incident, his account of which has met with some undeserved ridicule at +the hands of Tory criticism. When about to quit Rome for England +_via_ Switzerland and Germany he took the precaution of inquiring +of Baron von Humboldt, brother of the traveller, and then Prussian +Minister at the Court of Rome, whether the proposed route was safe, and +was by him informed that he would do well to keep out of the reach of +Bonaparte, who was meditating the seizure of his person. According to +Coleridge, indeed, an order for his arrest had actually been +transmitted to Rome, and he was only saved from its execution by the +connivance of the "good old Pope," Pius VII., who sent him a passport +and counselled his immediate flight. Hastening to Leghorn, he +discovered an American vessel ready to sail for England, on board of +which he embarked. On the voyage she was chased by a French vessel, +which so alarmed the captain that he compelled Coleridge to throw his +papers, including these precious MSS., overboard. The wrath of the +First Consul against him was supposed to have been excited by his +contributions to the _Morning Post_, an hypothesis which De +Quincey reasonably finds by no means so ridiculous as it appeared to a +certain writer in _Blackwood_, who treated it as the "very +consummation of moonstruck vanity," and compared it to "John Dennis's +frenzy in retreating from the sea-coast under the belief that Louis +XIV. had commissioned commissaries to land on the English shore and +make a dash at his person." It must be remembered, however, that Mr. +Fox, to whose statement on such a point Napoleon would be likely to +attach especial weight, had declared in the House of Commons that the +rupture of the Peace of Amiens had been brought about by certain essays +in the _Morning Post_, and there is certainly no reason to believe +that a tyrant whose animosity against literary or quasi-literary +assailants ranged from Madame de Stael down to the bookseller Palm +would have regarded a man of Coleridge's reputation in letters as +beneath the stoop of his vengeance. + +After an absence of two years and a half Coleridge arrived in England +in August 1806. That his then condition of mind and body was a +profoundly miserable one, and that he himself was acutely conscious +of it, will be seen later on in certain extracts from his correspondence; +but his own _Lines to William Wordsworth_--lines "composed on the +night after his recitation of a poem on the growth of an individual +mind"--contain an even more tragic expression of his state. It was +Wordsworth's pensive retrospect of their earlier years together which +awoke the bitterest pangs of self-reproach in his soul, and wrung from +it the cry which follows:-- + + "Ah! as I listened with a heart forlorn + The pulses of my being beat anew: + And even as life returns upon the drowned, + Life's joy rekindling roused a throng of pains-- + Keen pangs of Love, awakening as a babe + Turbulent, with an outcry in the heart; + And fears self-willed, that shunned the eye of hope; + And hope that scarce would know itself from fear; + Sense of past youth, and manhood come in vain, + And genius given, and knowledge won in vain; + And all which I had culled in wood-walks wild, + And all which patient toil had reared, and all, + Commune with thee had opened out--but flowers + Strewn on my corse, and borne upon my bier, + In the same coffin, for the self-same grave!" + +A dismal and despairing strain indeed, but the situation unhappily was +not less desperate. We are, in fact, entering upon that period of +Coleridge's life--a period, roughly speaking, of about ten years--which +no admirer of his genius, no lover of English letters, no one, it might +even be said, who wishes to think well of human nature, can ever +contemplate without pain. His history from the day of his landing in +England in August 1806 till the day when he entered Mr. Gillman's house +in 1816 is one long and miserable story of self-indulgence and self- +reproach, of lost opportunities, of neglected duties, of unfinished +undertakings. His movements and his occupation for the first year after +his return are not now traceable with exactitude, but his time was +apparently spent partly in London and partly at Grasmere and Keswick. +When in London, Mr. Stuart, who had now become proprietor of the +_Courier_, allowed him to occupy rooms at the office of that +newspaper to save him expense; and Coleridge, though his regular +connection with the _Courier_ did not begin till some years +afterwards, may possibly have repaid the accommodation by occasional +contributions or by assistance to its editor in some other form. It +seems certain, at any rate, that if he was earning no income in this +way he was earning none at all. His friend and patron, Mr. Thomas +Wedgwood, had died while he was in Malta; but the full pension of L150 +per annum bestowed upon him by the two brothers jointly continued to be +paid to him by Josiah, the senior. Coleridge, however, had landed in +England in ignorance of his patron's death. He had wholly neglected to +keep up any correspondence with the Wedgwoods during his stay in Malta, +and though "dreadfully affected" by it, as Mr. Poole records, he seems +to have allowed nearly a year to elapse before communicating with the +surviving brother. The letter which he then wrote deserves quotation, +not only as testimony to his physical and pecuniary condition on his +arrival in England, but as affording a distressing picture of the +morbid state of his emotions and the enfeebled condition of his will. +"As to the reasons for my silence, they are," he incoherently begins, +"impossible, and the numbers of the _causes_ of it, with the +almost weekly expectation for the last eight months of receiving my +books, manuscripts, etc. from Malta, has been itself a cause of +increasing the procrastination which constant ill health, despondency, +domestic distractions, and embarrassment from accidents, equally +unconnected with my will or conduct" [every cause mentioned, it will be +seen, but the true one], "had already seated deep in my very muscles, +as it were. I do not mean to accuse myself of idleness--I have enough +of self-crimination without adding imaginary articles--but in all +things that affect my moral feelings I have sunk under such a strange +cowardice of pain that I have not unfrequently kept letters from +persons dear to me for weeks together unopened. After a most miserable +passage from Leghorn of fifty-five days, during which my life was twice +given over, I found myself again in my native country, ill, penniless, +and worse than homeless. I had been near a month in the country before +I ventured or could summon courage enough to ask a question concerning +you and yours, and yet God Almighty knows that every hour the thought +had been gnawing at my heart. I then for the first time heard of that +event which sounded like my own knell, without its natural hope or +sense of rest. Such shall I be (is the thought that haunts me), but O! +not such; O! with what a different retrospect! But I owe it to justice +to say, Such good I truly can do myself, etc., etc." The rest of this +painfully inarticulate letter is filled with further complaints of ill +health, with further protestations of irresponsibility for the neglect +of duties, and with promises, never to be fulfilled, of composing or +assisting others to compose a memoir of Thomas Wedgwood, who, in +addition to his general repute as a man of culture, had made a special +mark by his speculations in psychology. + +The singular expression, "worse than homeless," and the reference to +domestic distractions, appear to indicate that some estrangement had +already set in between Coleridge and his wife. De Quincey's testimony +to its existence at the time (a month or so later) when he made +Coleridge's acquaintance may, subject to the usual deductions, be +accepted as trustworthy; and, of course, for aught we know, it may +then have been already of some years' standing. That the provocation +to it on the husband's part may be so far antedated is at least a +reasonable conjecture. There may be nothing--in all likelihood there +is nothing--worth attention in De Quincey's gossip about the young +lady, "intellectually very much superior to Mrs. Coleridge, who +became a neighbour and daily companion of Coleridge's walks" at +Keswick. But if there be no foundation for his remarks on "the +mischiefs of a situation which exposed Mrs. Coleridge to an invidious +comparison with a more intellectual person," there is undoubtedly +plenty of point in the immediately following observation that "it +was most unfortunate for Coleridge himself to be continually +compared with one so ideally correct and regular in his habits as Mr. +Southey." The passion of female jealousy assuredly did not need to be +called into play to account for the alienation of Mrs. Coleridge from +her husband. Mrs. Carlyle has left on record her pathetic lament over +the fate of a woman who marries a man of genius; but a man of genius of +the coldly selfish and exacting type of the Chelsea philosopher would +probably be a less severe burden to a woman of housewifely instincts +than the weak, unmethodical, irresolute, shiftless being that Coleridge +had by this time become. After the arrival of the Southeys, Mrs. +Coleridge would indeed have been more than human if she had not looked +with an envious eye upon the contrast between her sister Edith's lot +and her own. For this would give her the added pang of perceiving that +she was specially unlucky in the matter, and that men of genius could +("if they chose," as she would probably, though not perhaps quite +justly have put it) make very good husbands indeed. If one poet could +finish his poems, and pay his tradesmen's bills, and work steadily for +the publishers in his own house without the necessity of periodical +flittings to various parts of the United Kingdom or the Continent, why, +so could another. With such reflections as these Mrs. Coleridge's mind +was no doubt sadly busy during the early years of her residence at the +Lakes, and, since their causes did not diminish but rather increased in +intensity as time went on, the estrangement between them--or rather, to +do Coleridge justice, her estrangement from her husband--had, by 1806, +no doubt become complete. The fatal habit which even up to this time +seems to have been unknown to most of his friends could hardly have +been a secret to his wife, and his four or five years of slavery to it +may well have worn out her patience. + +This single cause indeed, namely, Coleridge's addiction to opium, is +quite sufficient, through the humiliations, discomfort, and privations, +pecuniary and otherwise, for which the vice was no doubt mediately or +immediately responsible, to account for the unhappy issue of a union +which undoubtedly was one of love to begin with, and which seems to +have retained that character for at least six years of its course. +We have noted the language of warm affection in which the "beloved +Sara" is spoken of in the early poems, and up to the time of +Coleridge's stay in Germany his feelings towards his wife remained +evidently unchanged. To his children, of whom three out of the four +born to him had survived, he was deeply attached; and the remarkable +promise displayed by the eldest son, Hartley, and his youngest child +and only daughter, Sara, made them objects of no less interest to his +intellect than to his heart. "Hartley," he writes to Mr. Poole in +1803, "is a strange, strange boy, exquisitely wild, an utter +visionary; like the moon among thin clouds, he moves in a circle +of light of his own making. He alone is a light of his own." And of his +daughter in the same poetic strain: "My meek little Sara is a +remarkably interesting baby, with the finest possible skin, and large +blue eyes, and she smiles as if she were basking in a sunshine as mild +as moonlight of her own quiet happiness." Derwent, a less remarkable +but no less attractive child than his brother and sister (whom he was +destined long to survive), held an equal place in his father's +affections. Yet all these interwoven influences--a deep love of his +children and a sincere attachment to his wife, of whom, indeed, he +never ceased to speak with respect and regard--were as powerless as in +so many thousands of other cases they have been, to brace an enfeebled +will to the task of self-reform. In 1807 "respect and regard" had +manifestly taken the place of any warmer feeling in his mind. Later on +in the letter above quoted he says, "In less than a week I go down to +Ottery, with my children and their mother, from a sense of duty" +(_i.e._ to his brother, the Rev. George Coleridge, who had +succeeded his father as head master of the Ottery St. Mary Grammar +School) "as far as it affects myself, and from a promise made to Mrs. +Coleridge, as far as it affects her, and indeed of a debt of respect to +her for her many praiseworthy qualities." When husbands and wives take +to liquidating debts of this kind, and in this spirit, it is pretty +conclusive evidence that all other accounts between them are +closed. + +The letter from which these extracts have been taken was +written from Aisholt near Bridgewater, where Coleridge was then +staying, with his wife and children, as the guest of a Mr. Price; and +his friend Poole's description to Josiah Wedgwood of his state at that +time is significant as showing that some at least of his intimate +acquaintances had no suspicion of the real cause of his bodily and +mental disorders. "I admire him," Poole writes, "and pity him more than +ever. His information is much extended, the _great_ qualities of +his mind heightened and better disciplined, but alas! his health is +much weaker, and his great failing, procrastination, or the +incapability of acting agreeably to his wish and will, much +increased." + +Whether the promised visit to Ottery St. Mary was ever paid there is +no record to show, but at the end of July 1807 we again hear of the +Coleridges at the house of a Mr. Chubb, a descendant of the Deist, at +Bridgewater; and here it was that De Quincey, after having endeavoured +in vain to run the poet to earth at Stowey, where he had been staying +with Mr. Poole, and whence he had gone to pay a short visit to Lord +Egmont, succeeded in obtaining an introduction to him. The +characteristic passage in which the younger man describes their +first meeting is too long for quotation, and it is to be hoped too well +known to need it: his vivid and acute criticism of Coleridge's +conversation may be more appropriately cited hereafter. His evidence as +to the conjugal relations of Coleridge and his wife has been already +discussed; and the last remaining point of interest about this +memorable introduction is the testimony which it incidentally affords +to De Quincey's genuine and generous instinct of hero-worship, and to +the depth of Coleridge's pecuniary embarrassments. The loan of L300, +which the poet's enthusiastic admirer insisted on Cottle's conveying to +him as from an unknown "young man of fortune who admired his talents," +should cover a multitude of De Quincey's subsequent sins. It was indeed +only upon Cottle's urgent representation that he had consented to +reduce the sum from L500 to L300. Nor does there seem any doubt of his +having honestly attempted to conceal his own identity with the nameless +benefactor, though, according to his own later account, he failed. +[1] + +This occurred in November 1807, and in the previous month De +Quincey had been able to render Coleridge a minor service, while at the +same moment gratifying a long cherished wish of his own. Mrs. Coleridge +was about to return with her children to Keswick, but her husband, not +yet master of this L300 windfall, and undoubtedly at his wits' end for +money, was arranging for a course of lectures to be delivered at the +Royal Institution early in the ensuing year, and could not accompany +them. De Quincey offered accordingly to be their escort, and duly +conducted them to Wordsworth's house, thus making the acquaintance of +the second of his two great poetical idols within a few months of +paying his first homage to the other. In February 1808 Coleridge again +took up his abode in London at his old free quarters in the +_Courier_ office, and began the delivery of a promised series of +sixteen lectures on Poetry and the Fine Arts. "I wish you could see +him," again writes Poole to Wedgwood, "you would pity and admire. He is +much improved, but has still less voluntary power than ever. Yet he is +so committed that I think he must deliver these lectures." Considering +that the authorities of the Royal Institution had agreed to pay him one +hundred guineas for delivering the lectures, he undoubtedly was more or +less "committed;" and his voluntary power, however small, might be +safely supposed to be equal to the task of fulfilling a contract. But +to get the lecturer into the lecture-room does not amount to much more +than bringing the horse to the water. You can no more make the one +drink than you can prevent the other from sending his audience away +thirsty. Coleridge's lectures on Poetry and the Fine Arts were +confused, ill arranged, and generally disappointing to the last degree. +Sometimes it was not even possible to bring the horse to the water. +Charles Lamb writes to Manning on the 20th of February 1808 (early days +indeed) that Coleridge had only delivered two lectures, and that though +"two more were intended, he did not come." De Quincey writes of +"dismissals of audience after audience, with pleas of illness; and on +many of his lecture-days I have seen all Albemarle Street closed by a +lock of carriages filled with women of distinction, until the servants +of the Institution or their own footmen advanced to the carriage-doors +with the intelligence that Mr. Coleridge had been suddenly taken ill." +Naturally there came a time when the "women of distinction" began to +tire of this treatment. "The plea, which at first had been received +with expressions of concern, repeated too often began to rouse disgust. +Many in anger, and some in real uncertainty whether it would not be +trouble thrown away, ceased to attend." And what De Quincey has to say +of the lectures themselves when they did by chance get delivered is no +less melancholy. "The lecturer's appearance," he says, "was generally +that of a man struggling with pain and over-mastering illness." + +"His lips were baked with feverish heat, and often black in colour; and +in spite of the water which he continued drinking through the whole +course of the lecture, he often seemed to labour under an almost paralytic +inability to raise the upper jaw from the lower" [_i.e._ I suppose +to move the lower jaw]. "In such a state it is clear that nothing could +save the lecture itself from reflecting his own feebleness and +exhaustion except the advantage of having been precomposed in some +happier mood. But that never happened: most unfortunately, he relied on +his extempore ability to carry him through. Now, had he been in +spirits, or had he gathered animation and kindled by his own emotion, +no written lecture could have been more effectual than one of his +unpremeditated colloquial harangues. But either he was depressed +originally below the point from which reascent was possible, or else +this reaction was intercepted by continual disgust from looking back +upon his own ill success; for assuredly he never once recovered that +free and eloquent movement of thought which he could command at any +time in a private company. The passages he read, moreover, in +illustrating his doctrines, were generally unhappily chosen, because +chosen at haphazard, from the difficulty of finding at a moment's +summons these passages which his purpose required. Nor do I remember +any that produced much effect except two or three which I myself put +ready marked into his hands among the _Metrical Romances_, edited +by Ritson. Generally speaking, the selections were as injudicious and +as inappropriate as they were ill delivered, for among Coleridge's +accomplishments good reading was not one. He had neither voice (so at +least I thought) nor management of voice. This defect is unfortunate in +a public lecturer, for it is inconceivable how much weight and +effectual pathos can be communicated by sonorous depth and melodious +cadence of the human voice to sentiments the most trivial; [2] nor, on +the other hand, how the grandest are emasculated by a style of reading +which fails in distributing the lights and shadows of a musical +intonation. However, this defect chiefly concerned the immediate +impression; the most afflicting to a friend of Coleridge's was the +entire absence of his own peculiar and majestic intellect; no heart, no +soul, was in anything he said; no strength of feeling in recalling +universal truths, no power of originality or compass of moral +relations in his novelties,--all was a poor, faint reflection from +pearls once scattered on the highway by himself in the prodigality of +his early opulence--a mendicant dependence on the alms dropped from his +own overflowing treasury of happier times." + +Severe as is this censure of the lectures, there is unhappily no good +ground for disputing its substantial justice. And the inferences which +it suggests are only too painfully plain. One can well understand +Coleridge's being an ineffective lecturer, and no failure in this +respect, however conspicuous, would necessarily force us to the +hypothesis of physical disability. But a Coleridge who could no more +compose a lecture than he could deliver one-a Coleridge who could +neither write nor extemporise anything specially remarkable on a +subject so congenial to him as that of English poetry--must +assuredly have spent most of his time, whether in the lecture-room or +out of it, in a state of incapacity for sustained intellectual effort. +De Quincey's humorous account of the lecturer's shiftless untidy life +at the Courier office, and even the Rabelaisian quip which Charles +Lamb throws at it in the above-quoted letter to Manning, are +sufficient indications of his state at this time. "Oh, Charles," +he writes to Lamb, early in February, just before the course of +lectures was to begin, "I am very, very ill. _Vixi._" The sad +truth is that, as seems to have been always the case with him when +living alone, he was during these months of his residence in London +more constantly and hopelessly under the dominion of opium than ever. + + +FOOTNOTES + +1. "In a letter written by him (Coleridge) about fifteen years after +that time, I found that he had become aware of all the circumstances, +perhaps through some indiscretion of Mr. Cottle's." Perhaps, however, +no very great indiscretion on Mr. Cottle's part was needed to enable +Coleridge to trace the loan to so ardent a young admirer and disciple. + +2. The justice of this criticism will be acknowledged by those many +persons whom Mr. Bright's great elocutionary skill has occasionally +deluded into imagining that the very commonplace verse which the famous +orator has been often known to quote with admiration is poetry of a +high order. + + + + +CHAPTER VII. + +Return to the Lakes--From Keswick to Grasmere--With Wordsworth at Allan +Bank--The _Friend_--Quits the Lake country for ever. + +[1809-1810.] + + +From the close of this series of lectures in the month of May 1808 +until the end of the year it is impossible to trace Coleridge's +movements or even to determine the nature of his occupation with any +approach to exactitude. The probability is, however, that he remained +in London at his lodgings in the _Courier_ office, and that he +supported himself by rendering assistance in various ways to Mr. Daniel +Stuart. We know nothing of him, however, with certainty until we find +him once more at the Lakes in the early part of the year 1809, but not +in his own home. Wordsworth had removed from his former abode at +Grasmere to Allan Bank, a larger house some three-quarters of a mile +distant, and there Coleridge took up his residence, more, it would +seem, as a permanent inmate of his friend's house than as a guest. The +specific cause of this migration from Greta Hall to Allan Bank does not +appear, but all the accessible evidence, contemporary and subsequent, +seems to point to the probability that it was the result of a definite +break-up of Coleridge's own home. He continued, at any rate, to reside +in Wordsworth's house during the whole seven months of his editorship +of the _Friend_, a new venture in periodical literature which he +undertook at this period; and we shall see that upon its failure he did +not resume his residence at Greta Hall, but quitted the Lake country at +once and for ever. + +We need not take too literally Coleridge's declaration in the _Biographia +Literaria_ that one "main object of his in starting the _Friend_ +was to establish the philosophical distinction between the Reason and +the Understanding." Had this been so, or at least had the periodical +been actually conducted in conformity with any such purpose, even the +chagrined projector himself could scarcely have had the face to +complain, as Coleridge did very bitterly, of the reception accorded to +it by the public. The most unpractical of thinkers can hardly have +imagined that the "general reader" would "take in" a weekly metaphysical +journal published at a town in Cumberland. The _Friend_ was not +quite so essentially hopeless an enterprise as that would have been; +but the accidents of mismanagement and imprudence soon made it, for +all practical purposes, sufficiently desperate. Even the forlorn +_Watchman_, which had been set on foot when Coleridge had fourteen +years' less experience of the world, was hardly more certainly +foredoomed. The first care of the founder of the _Friend_ was to +select, as the place of publication, a town exactly twenty-eight miles +from his own abode--a distance virtually trebled, as De Quincey +observes, "by the interposition of Kirkstone, a mountain only to be +scaled by a carriage ascent of three miles, and so steep in parts that +without four horses no solitary traveller can persuade the neighbouring +innkeepers to convey him." Here, however, at Penrith, "by way of +purchasing intolerable difficulties at the highest price," Coleridge was +advised and actually persuaded to set up a printer, to buy and lay in a +stock of paper, types, etc., instead of resorting to some printer already +established at a nearer place--as, for instance, Kendal, which was ten +miles nearer, and connected with Coleridge's then place of residence by +a daily post, whereas at Penrith there was no post at all. Having thus +studiously and severely handicapped himself, the projector of the new +periodical set to work, upon the strength of what seems to have been in +great measure a fancy list of subscribers, to print and, so far as his +extraordinary arrangements permitted, to circulate his journal. With +_naive_ sententiousness he warns the readers of the _Biographia +Literaria_ against trusting, in their own case, to such a guarantee +as he supposed himself to possess. "You cannot," he observes, "be certain +that the names on a subscription list have been put down by sufficient +authority; or, should that be ascertained, it still remains to be known +whether they were not extorted by some over-zealous friend's +importunity; whether the subscriber had not yielded his name merely +from want of courage to say no! and with the intention of dropping the +work as soon as possible." Thus out of a hundred patrons who had been +obtained for the _Friend_ by an energetic canvasser, "ninety threw +up the publication before the fourth number without any notice, though +it was well known to them that in consequence of the distance and the +slowness and irregularity of the conveyance" [it is amusing to observe +the way in which Coleridge notes these drawbacks of his own creation as +though they were "the act of God"] "I was compelled to lay in a stock +of stamped paper for at least eight weeks beforehand, each sheet of +which stood me in fivepence previous to its arrival at my printer's; +though the subscription money was not to be received till the twenty- +first week after the commencement of the work; and, lastly, though it +was in nine cases out of ten impracticable for me to receive the money +for two or three numbers without paying an equal sum for the postage." + +Enough appears in this undesignedly droll account of the +venture to show pretty clearly that, even had the _Friend_ +obtained a reasonable measure of popularity at starting, the flagrant +defects in the methods of distributing and financing it must have +insured its early decease. But, as a matter of fact, it had no chance +of popularity from the outset. Its first number appeared on 1st August +1809, and Coleridge, writing to Southey on 20th October of the same +year, speaks of his "original apprehension" that the plan and execution +of the _Friend_ is so utterly unsuitable to the public taste as to +preclude all rational hopes of its success. "Much," he continues, +"might have been done to have made the former numbers less so, by the +interposition of others written more expressly for general interest;" +and he promises to do his best in future to "interpose tales and whole +numbers of amusement, which will make the periods lighter and shorter." +Meanwhile he begs Southey to write a letter to the _Friend_ in a +lively style, rallying its editor on "his Quixotism in expecting that +the public will ever pretend to understand his lucubrations or feel any +interest in subjects of such sad and unkempt antiquity." Southey, ever +good-natured, complied, even amid the unceasing press of his work, with +the request; and to the letter of lightly-touched satire which he +contributed to the journal he added a few private lines of friendly +counsel, strongly urging Coleridge to give two or three amusing +numbers, and he would hear of admiration on every side. "Insert too," +he suggested, "a few more poems--any that you have, except _Christabel_, +for that is of too much value. And write _now_ that character of +Bonaparte, announced in former times for 'to-morrow, and to-morrow, +and to-morrow.'" It was too late, however, for good advice to be of +any avail: the _Friend_ was past praying for. It lingered on +till its twenty-eighth number, and expired, unlike the Watchman, +without any farewell to its friends, in the third week of March 1810. + +The republication of this periodical, or rather selections +from it, which appeared in 1818, is hardly perhaps described with +justice in De Quincey's words as "altogether and absolutely a new +work." A reader can, at any rate, form a pretty fair estimate from it +of the style and probable public attractions of the original issue; and +a perusal of it, considered in its character as a bid for the patronage +of the general reader, is certainly calculated to excite an +astonishment too deep for words. We have, of course, to bear in mind +that the standard of the readable in our grandfathers' days was a more +liberal and tolerant one than it is in our own. In those days of +leisurely communications and slowly moving events there was relatively +at least a far larger public for a weekly issue of moral and +philosophical essays, under the name of a periodical, than it would be +found easy to secure at present, when even a monthly discourse upon +things in general requires Mr. Euskin's brilliancy of eloquence, +vivacity of humour, and perpetual charm of unexpectedness to carry it +off. Still the _Spectator_ continued to be read in Coleridge's +day, and people therefore must have had before them a perpetual example +of what it was possible to do in the way of combining entertainment +with instruction. How, then, it could have entered into the mind of the +most sanguine projector to suppose that the _longueurs_ and the +difficulty of the _Friend_ would be patiently borne with for the +sake of the solid nutriment which it contained it is quite impossible +to understand. Even supposing that a weekly, whose avowed object was +"to aid in the formation of fixed principles in politics, morals, and +religion," could possibly be floated, even "with literary amusements +interspersed," it is evident that very much would depend upon the +character of these "amusements" themselves. In the republication of +1817 they appear under the heading of "landing-places." One of them +consists of a parallel between Voltaire and Erasmus, and between +Rousseau and Luther, founded, of course, on the respective attitudes of +the two pairs of personages to the Revolution and the Reformation. +Another at the end of the series consists of a criticism of, and +panegyric on, Sir Alexander Ball, the governor of Malta. Such are the +landing-places. But how should any reader, wearied with "for ever +climbing up the climbing wave" of Coleridge's eloquence, have found +rest or refreshment on one of these uncomfortable little sandbanks? It +was true that the original issue of the _Friend_ contained +poetical contributions which do not appear in the republication; but +poetry in itself, or, at any rate, good poetry, is not a relief to the +overstrained faculties, and, even if it were, the relief would have +been provided at too infrequent intervals to affect the general result. +The fact is, however, that Coleridge's own theory of his duty as a +public instructor was in itself fatal to any hope of his venture +proving a commercial success. Even when entreated by Southey to lighten +the character of the periodical, he accompanies his admission of the +worldly wisdom of the advice with something like a protest against such +a departure from the severity of his original plan. His object, as he +puts it with much cogency from his own unpractical point of view--his +object being to teach men how to think on politics, religion, and +morals, and thinking being a very arduous and distasteful business to +the mass of mankind, it followed that the essays of the _Friend_ +(and particularly the earlier essays, in which the reader required to +be "grounded" in his subject) could hardly be agreeable reading. With +perfect frankness indeed does he admit in his prospectus that he must +"submit to be thought dull by those who seek amusement only." He hoped, +however, as he says in one of his earlier essays, to become livelier as +he went on. "The proper merit of a foundation is its massiveness and +solidity. The conveniences and ornaments, the gilding and stucco-work, +the sunshine and sunny prospects, will come with the superstructure." +But the building, alas! was never destined to be completed, and the +architect had his own misgivings about the attractions even of the +completed edifice. "I dare not flatter myself that any endeavours of +mine, compatible with the duty I owe to the truth and the hope of +permanent utility, will render the _Friend_ agreeable to the +majority of what is called the reading public. I never expected it. How +indeed could I when, etc." Yet, in spite of these professions, it is +clear from the prospectus that Coleridge believed in the possibility of +obtaining a public for the _Friend_. He says that "a motive for +honourable ambition was supplied by the fact that every periodical +paper of the kind now attempted, which had been conducted with zeal and +ability, was not only well received at the time, but has become +popular;" and he seems to regard it as a comparatively unimportant +circumstance that the _Friend_ would be distinguished from "its +celebrated predecessors, the _Spectator_ and the like," by the +"greater length of the separate essays, by their closer connection with +each other, and by the predominance of one object, and the common +bearing of all to one end." It was, of course, exactly this _plus_ +of prolixity and _minus_ of variety which lowered the sum of the +_Friend's_ attractions so far below that of the _Spectator_ +as to deprive the success of Addison of all its value as a +precedent. + +Nor is it easy to agree with the editor of the reprint of +1837 that the work, "with all its imperfections, is perhaps the most +vigorous" of its author's compositions. That there are passages in it +which impress us by their force of expression, as well as by subtlety +or beauty of thought, must of course be admitted. It was impossible to +a man of Coleridge's literary power that it should be otherwise. But +"vigorous" is certainly not the adjective which seems to me to suggest +itself to an impartial critic of these too copious disquisitions. +Making every allowance for their necessary elasticity of scope as being +designed to "prepare and discipline the student's moral and +intellectual being, not to propound dogmas and theories for his +adoption," it must, I think, be allowed that they are wanting in that +continuity of movement and co-ordination of parts which, as it seems to +me, enters into any intelligible definition of "vigour," as attributed +to a work of moral and political exposition considered as a whole. The +writer's discursiveness is too often and too vexatiously felt by the +reader to permit of the survival of any sense of theorematic unity in +his mind; he soon gives up all attempts at periodical measurement of +his own and his author's progress towards the prescribed goal of their +journey; and he resigns himself in this, as in so many other of +Coleridge's prose works, to a study of isolated and detached passages. +So treated, however, one may freely admit that the _Friend_ is +fully worthy of the admiration with which Mr. H. N. Coleridge regarded +it. If not the most vigorous, it is beyond all comparison the most +characteristic of all his uncle's performances in this field of his +multiform activity. In no way could the peculiar pregnancy of +Coleridge's thoughts, the more than scholastic subtlety of his +dialectic, and the passionate fervour of his spirituality be more +impressively exhibited than by a well-made selection of _loci_ +from the pages of the _Friend_. + + + + +CHAPTER VIII. + +London again--Second recourse to journalism--The _Courier_ +articles--The Shakespeare lectures--Production of _Remorse_--At +Bristol again as lecturer--Residence at Calne--Increasing ill health +and embarrassment--Retirement to Mr. Gillman's. + +[1810-1816.] + + +The life led by Coleridge during the six years next ensuing is +difficult to trace, even in the barest outline; to give a detailed and +circumstantial account of it from any ordinarily accessible source of +information is impossible. Nor is it, I imagine, very probable that +even the most exhaustive search among whatever imprinted records may +exist in the possession of his friends would at all completely supply +the present lack of biographical material. For not only had it become +Coleridge's habit to disappear from the sight of his kinsmen and +acquaintances for long periods together; he had fallen almost wholly +silent also. They not only ceased to see him, but they ceased to hear +of him. Letters addressed to him, even on subjects of the greatest +importance, would remain for months unnoticed, and in many instances +would receive no answer at all. His correspondence during the next +half-dozen years must have been of the scantiest amount and the most +intermittent character, and a biographer could hope, therefore, for +but little aid in bridging over the large gaps in his knowledge of +this period, even if every extant letter written by Coleridge during +its continuance were to be given to the world. + +Such light, too, as is retrospectively thrown upon it by Coleridge's +correspondence of a later date is of the most fitful description,-- +scarcely more than serves, in fact, for the rendering of darkness +visible. Even the sudden and final departure from the Lakes it leaves +involved in as much obscurity as ever. Writing to Mr. Thomas Allsop +[1] from Ramsgate twelve years afterwards (8th October 1822) he says +that he "counts four grasping and griping sorrows in his past life." +The first of these "was when" [no date given] "the vision of a happy +home sank for ever, and it became impossible for me longer even to +hope for domestic happiness under the name of husband." That is plain +enough on the whole, though it still leaves us in some uncertainty as +to whether the "sinking of the vision" was as gradual as the +estrangement between husband and wife, or whether he refers to some +violent rupture of relations with Mrs. Coleridge, possibly +precipitating his departure from the Lakes. If soothe second "griping +and grasping sorrow" followed very quickly on the first, for he says +that it overtook him "on the night of his arrival from Grasmere with +Mr. and Mrs. Montagu;" while in the same breath and paragraph, and as +though undoubtedly referring to the same thing, he speaks of the +"destruction of a friendship of fifteen years when, just at the moment +of Tenner and Curtis's (the publishers) bankruptcy" (by which +Coleridge was a heavy loser, but which did not occur till seven years +afterwards), somebody indicated by seven asterisks and possessing an +income of L1200 a-year, was "totally transformed into baseness." There +is certainly not much light here, any more than in the equally +enigmatical description of the third sorrow as being "in some sort +included in the second," so that "what the former was to friendship +the latter was to a still more inward bond." The truth is, that all +Coleridge's references to himself in his later years are shrouded in a +double obscurity. One veil is thrown over them by his deliberate +preference for abstract and mystical forms of expression, and another +perhaps by that kind of shameful secretiveness which grows upon all +men who become the slaves of concealed indulgences, and which often +displays itself on occasions when it has no real object to gain of any +kind whatever. + +Thus much only we know, that on reaching London in the summer of 1810 +Coleridge became the guest of the Montagus, and that, after some +months' residence with them, he left as the immediate result of some +difference with his host which was never afterwards composed. Whether +it arose from the somewhat trivial cause to which De Quincey has, +admittedly upon the evidence of "the learned in literary scandal," +referred it, it is now impossible to say. But at some time or other, +towards the close probably of 1810, or in the early months of 1811, +Coleridge quitted Mr. Montagu's house for that of Mr. John Morgan, a +companion of his early Bristol days, and a common friend of his and +Southey's; and here, at No. 7 Portland Place, Hammersmith, he was +residing when, for the second time, he resolved to present himself to +the London public in the capacity of lecturer. His services were on +this occasion engaged by the London Philosophical Society, at Crane +Court, Fleet Street, and their prospectus announced that on Monday, +18th November, Mr. Coleridge would commence "a course of lectures on +Shakspeare and Milton, in illustration of the principles of poetry and +their application, on grounds of criticism, to the most popular works +of later English poets, those of the living included. After an +introductory lecture on false criticism (especially in poetry) and on +its causes, two-thirds of the remaining course," continues the +prospectus, "will be assigned, 1st, to a philosophical analysis and +explanation of all the principal characters of our great dramatists, +as Othello, Falstaff, Richard the Third, Lago, Hamlet, etc., and to a +critical comparison of Shakspeare in respect of diction, imagery, +management of the passions, judgment in the construction of his +dramas--in short, of all that belongs to him as a poet, and as a +dramatic poet, with his contemporaries or immediate successors, +Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Ford, Massinger, and in the endeavour +to determine which of Shakespeare's merits and defects are common to +him, with other writers of the same age, and what remain peculiar to +his genius." + +A couple of months before the commencement of this course, viz. in +September 1811, Coleridge seems to have entered into a definite +journalistic engagement with his old editor, Mr. Daniel Stuart, then +the proprietor of the _Courier_. It was not, however, his first +connection with that journal. He had already published at least one +piece of verse in its columns, and two years before, while the +_Friend_ was still in existence, he had contributed to it a +series of letters on the struggle of the Spaniards against their +French invaders. In these, as though to show that under the ashes of +his old democratic enthusiasm still lived its wonted fires, and that +the inspiration of a popular cause was only needed to reanimate them, +we find, with less of the youthful lightness of touch and agility of +movement, a very near approach to the vigour of his early journalistic +days. Whatever may be thought of the historic value of the parallel +which he institutes between the struggle of the Low Countries against +their tyrant, and that of the Peninsula against its usurping +conqueror, it is worked out with remarkable ingenuity of completeness. +Whole pages of the letters are radiant with that steady flame of +hatred which, ever since the hour of his disillusionment, had glowed +in his breast at the name and thought of Bonaparte; and whenever he +speaks of the Spaniards, of Spanish patriotism, of the Spanish Cortes, +we see that the names of "the people," of "freedom," of "popular +assembly," have some of their old magic for him still. The following +passage is almost pathetic in its reminder of the days of 1792, before +that modern Leonidas, the young French Republic, had degenerated into +the Xerxes of the Empire. + +"The power which raised up, established, and enriched the Dutch +republic,--the same mighty power is no less at work in the present +struggle of the Spanish nation, a power which mocks the calculations +of ordinary statecraft too subtle to be weighed against it, and mere +outward brute force too different from it to admit of comparison. A +power as mighty in the rational creation as the element of electricity +in the material world; and, like that element, infinite in its +affinities, infinite in its mode of action, combining the most +discordant natures, fixing the most volatile, and arming the sluggish +vapour of the marsh with arrows of fire; working alike in silence and +in tempest, in growth and in destruction; now contracted to an +individual soul, and now, as in a moment, dilating itself over a whole +nation! Am I asked what this mighty power may be, and wherein it +exists? If we are worthy of the fame which we possess as the +countrymen of Hampden, Russell, and Algernon Sidney, we shall find the +answer in our own hearts. It is the power of the insulted free-will, +steadied by the approving conscience and struggling against brute +force and iniquitous compulsion for the common rights of human nature, +brought home to our inmost souls by being, at the same time, the +rights of our betrayed, insulted, and bleeding country." + +And as this passage recalls the most striking characteristics of his +earlier style, so may its conclusion serve as a fair specimen of the +calmer eloquence of his later manner:-- + +"It is a painful truth, sir, that these men who appeal most to facts, +and pretend to take them for their exclusive guide, are the very +persons who most disregard the light of experience when it refers them +to the mightiness of their own inner nature, in opposition to those +forces which they can see with their eyes, and reduce to figures upon +a slate. And yet, sir, what is history for the greater and more useful +part but a voice from the sepulchres of our forefathers, assuring us, +from their united experience, that our spirits are as much stronger +than our bodies as they are nobler and more permanent? The historic +muse appears in her loftiest character as the nurse of Hope. It is her +appropriate praise that her records enable the magnanimous to silence +the selfish and cowardly by appealing to actual events for the +information of these truths which they themselves first learned from +the surer oracle of their own reason." + +But this reanimation of energy was but a transient phenomenoa It did +not survive the first freshness of its exciting cause. The Spanish +insurrection grew into the Peninsular war, and though the glorious +series of Wellington's victories might well, one would think, have +sustained the rhetorical temperature at its proper pitch, it failed to +do so. Or was it, as the facts appear now and then to suggest, that +Coleridge at Grasmere or Keswick-Coleridge in the inspiring (and +restraining) companionship of close friends and literary compeers--was +an altogether different man from Coleridge in London, alone with his +thoughts and his opium? The question cannot be answered with +confidence, and the fine quality of the lectures on Shakespeare is +sufficient to show that, for some time, at any rate, after his final +migration to London, his critical faculty retained its full vigour. +But it is beyond dispute that his regular contributions to the +_Courier_ in 1811-12 are not only vastly inferior to his articles +of a dozen years before in the _Morning Post_ but fall sensibly +short of the level of the letters of 1809, from which extract has just +been made. Their tone is spiritless, and they even lack distinction of +style. Their very subjects, and the mode of treating them, appear to +show a change in Coleridge's attitude towards public affairs if not in +the very conditions of his journalistic employment. They have much +more of the character of newspaper hack-work than his earlier +contributions. He seems to have been, in many instances, set to write +a mere report, and often a rather dry and mechanical report of this or +the other Peninsular victory. He seldom or never discusses the +political situation, as his wont had been, _au large_; and in +place of broad statesmanlike reflection on the scenes and actors in +the great world-drama then in progress, we meet with too much of that +sort of criticism on the consistency and capacity of "our +contemporary, the _Morning Chronicle_," which had less attraction, +it may be suspected, even for the public of its own day than +for the journalistic profession, while for posterity, of course, +it possesses no interest at all. The series of contributions extends +from September of 1811 until April of the following year, and appears +to have nearly come to a premature and abrupt close in the +intermediate July, when an article written by Coleridge in strong +opposition to the proposed reinstatement of the Duke of York in the +command-in-chief was, by ministerial influence, suppressed before +publication. This made Coleridge, as his daughter informs us on the +authority of Mr. Crabb Kobinson, "very uncomfortable," and he was +desirous of being engaged on another paper. He wished to be connected +with the _Times_, and "I spoke," says Mr. Eobinson, "with Walter +on the subject, but the negotiation failed." + +With the conclusion of the lectures on Shakespeare, and the loss of +the stimulus, slight as it then was to him, of regular duties and +recurring engagements, Coleridge seems to have relapsed once more into +thoroughly desultory habits of work. The series of aphorisms and +reflections which he contributed in 1812 to Southey's _Omniana_, +witty, suggestive, profound as many of them are, must not of course be +referred to the years in which they were given to the world. They +belong unquestionably to the order of _marginalia_, the scattered +notes of which De Quincey speaks with not extravagant admiration, and +which, under the busy pencil of a commentator always indefatigable in +the _strenua inertia_ of reading, had no doubt accumulated in +considerable quantities over a long course of years. + +The disposal, however, of this species of literary material could +scarcely have been a source of much profit to him, and Coleridge's +difficulties of living must by this time have been growing acute. His +pension from the Wedgwoods had been assigned, his surviving son has +stated, to the use of his family, and even this had been in the +previous year reduced by half. "In Coleridge's neglect," observes Miss +Meteyard, "of his duties to his wife, his children, and his friends, +must be sought the motives which led Mr. Wedgwood in 1811 to withdraw +his share of the annuity. An excellent, even over-anxious father, he +was likely to be shocked at a neglect which imposed on the generosity +of Southey, himself heavily burdened, those duties which every man of +feeling and honour proudly and even jealously guards as his own.... +The pension of L150 per annum had been originally granted with the +view to secure Coleridge independence and leisure while he effected +some few of his manifold projects of literary work. But ten years had +passed, and these projects were still _in nubibus_--even the life +of Leasing, even the briefer memoir of Thomas Wedgwood; and gifts so +well intentioned, had as it were, ministered to evil rather than to +good." We can hardly wonder at the step, however we may regret it; and +if one of the reasons adduced in defence of it savours somewhat of the +fallacy known as _... non cause, pro cause_, we may perhaps +attribute that rather to the maladroitness of Miss Meteyard's advocacy +than to the weakness of Mr. Wedgwood's logic. The fact, however, that +this "excellent, even over-anxious father" was shocked at a neglect +which imposed a burden on the generosity of Southey, is hardly a just +ground for cutting off one of the supplies by which that burden was +partially relieved. As to the assignment of the pension to the family, +it is impossible to question what has been positively affirmed by an +actual member of that family, the Rev. Derwent Coleridge himself; +though, when he adds that not only was the school education of both the +sons provided from this source, but that through his (Coleridge's) +influence they were both sent to college, his statement is at variance, +as will be presently seen, with an authority equal to his own. + +In 1812, at any rate, we may well believe that Coleridge's necessities +had become pressing, and the timely service then rendered to him by +Lord Byron may have been suggested almost as much by a knowledge of +his needs as by admiration for the dramatic merits of his long-since +rejected tragedy. _Osorio's_ time had at any rate come. The +would-be fratricide changed his name to Ordonio, and ceased to stand +sponsor to the play, which was rechristened _Remorse_, and +accepted at last, upon Byron's recommendation, by the committee of +Drury Lane Theatre, the playhouse at whose doors it had knocked vainly +fifteen years before it was performed there for the first time on the +23d of January 1813. The prologue and epilogue, without which in those +times no gentleman's drama was accounted complete, was written, the +former by Charles Lamb, the latter by the author himself. It obtained +a brilliant success on its first representation, and was honoured with +what was in those days regarded as the very respectable run of twenty +nights. + +The success, however, which came so opportunely for his material +necessities was too late to produce any good effect upon Coleridge's +mental state. But a month after the production of his tragedy we find +him writing in the most dismal strain of hypochondria to Thomas Poole. +The only pleasurable sensation which the success of _Remorse_ had +given him was, he declares, the receipt of his friend's "heart- +engendered lines" of congratulation. "No grocer's apprentice, after +his first month's permitted riot, was ever sicker of figs and raisins +than I of hearing about the _Remorse_. The endless rat-a-tat-tat +at our black-and-blue bruised doors, and my three master-fiends, +proof-sheets, letters, and--worse than these--invitations to large +dinners, which I cannot refuse without offence and imputation of +pride, etc., oppress me so much that my spirits quite sink under it. I +have never seen the play since the first night. It has been a good +thing for the theatre. They will get eight or ten thousand pounds by +it, and I shall get more than by all my literary labours put together +--nay, thrice as much." So large a sum of money as this must have +amounted to should surely have lasted him for years; but the +particular species of intemperance to which he was now hopelessly +enslaved is probably the most costly of all forms of such indulgence, +and it seems pretty evident that the proceeds of his theatrical +_coup_ were consumed in little more than a year. + +Early in 1814, at any rate, Coleridge once more returned to his old +occupation of lecturer, and this time not in London, but in the scene +of his first appearance in that capacity. The lectures which he +proposed to deliver at Bristol were, in fact, a repetition of the +course of 1811-12; but the ways of the lecturer, to judge from an +amusing story recorded by Cottle, more nearly resembled his +proceedings in 1808. A "brother of Mr. George Cumberland," who +happened to be his fellow-traveller to Bristol on this occasion, +relates that before the coach started Coleridge's attention was +attracted by a little Jew boy selling pencils, with whom he entered +into conversation, and with whose superior qualities he was so +impressed as to declare that "if he had not an important engagement at +Bristol he would stay behind to provide some better condition for the +lad." The coach having started, "the gentleman" (for his name was +unknown to the narrator of the incident) "talked incessantly and in a +most entertaining way for thirty miles out of London, and, afterwards, +with little intermission till they reached Marlborough," when he +discovered that a lady in the coach with him was a particular friend +of his; and on arriving at Bath he quitted the coach declaring that he +was determined not to leave her till he had seen her safe to her +brother's door in North Wales. This was the day fixed for the delivery +of Coleridge's first lecture. Two or three days afterwards, having +completed his _detour_ by North Wales, he arrived at Bristol: +another day was fixed for the commencement of the course, and +Coleridge then presented himself an hour after the audience had taken +their seats. The "important engagement" might be broken, it seems, for +a mere whim, though not for a charitable impulse--a distinction +testifying to a mixture of insincerity and unpunctuality not pleasant +to note as an evidence of the then state of Coleridge's emotions and +will. + +Thus inauspiciously commenced, there was no reason why the Bristol +lectures of 1814 should be more successful than the London Institution +lectures of 1808; nor were they, it appears, in fact. They are said to +have been "sparsely attended,"--no doubt owing to the natural +unwillingness of people to pay for an hour's contemplation of an empty +platform; and their pecuniary returns in consequence were probably +insignificant. Coleridge remained in Bristol till the month of August, +when he returned to London. + +The painful task of tracing his downward course is now almost +completed. In the middle of this year he touched the lowest point of +his descent. Cottle, who had a good deal of intercourse with him by +speech and letter in 1814, and who had not seen him since 1807, was +shocked by his extreme prostration, and then for the first time +ascertained the cause. "In 1814," he says in his _Recollections_, +"S. T. C. had been long, very long, in the habit of taking from two +quarts of laudanum a week to a pint a day, and on one occasion he had +been known to take in the twenty-four hours a whole quart of laudanum. +The serious expenditure of money resulting from this habit was the +least evil, though very great, and must have absorbed all the produce +of his writings and lectures and the liberalities of his friends." +Cottle addressed to him a letter of not very delicate remonstrance on +the subject, to which Coleridge replied in his wontedly humble strain. + +There is a certain Pharisaism about the Bristol poet-publisher which +renders it necessary to exercise some little caution in the acceptance +of his account of Coleridge's condition; but the facts, from whatever +source one seeks them, appear to acquit him of any exaggeration in his +summing up of the melancholy matter. "A general impression," he says, +"prevailed on the minds of Coleridge's friends that it was a desperate +case, that paralysed all their efforts; that to assist Coleridge with +money which, under favourable circumstances would have been most +promptly advanced, would now only enlarge his capacity to obtain the +opium which was consuming him. We merely knew that Coleridge had +retired with his friend, Mr. John Morgan, to a small house at Calne in +Wiltshire." + +It must have been at Calne, then, that Coleridge composed the series +of "Letters to Mr. Justice Fletcher concerning his charge to the Grand +Jury of the county of Wexford, at the summer Assizes in 1814," which +appeared at intervals in the _Courier_ between 20th September and +10th December of this year. Their subject, a somewhat injudiciously +animated address to the aforesaid Grand Jury on the subject of the +relations between Catholicism and Protestantism in Ireland, was well +calculated to stimulate the literary activity of a man who always took +something of the keen interest of the modern Radical in the eternal +Irish question; and the letters are not wanting either in +argumentative force or in grave impressiveness of style. But their lack +of spring and energy as compared with Coleridge's earlier work in +journalism is painfully visible throughout. + +Calne, it is to be supposed, was still Coleridge's place of abode when +Southey (17th October) wrote Cottle that letter which appears in his +_Correspondence_, and which illustrates with such sad completeness +the contrast between the careers of the two generous, romantic, +brilliant youths who had wooed their wives together--and between the +fates, one must add, of the two sisters who had listened to their +wooing--eighteen years before: a letter as honourable to the writer as +it is the reverse to its subject. "Can you," asks Southey, "tell me +anything of Coleridge? A few lines of introduction for a son of Mr.---- +of St. James's, in your city, are all that we have received from him +since I saw him last September twelvemonth (1813) in town. The children +being thus left entirely to chance, I have applied to his brothers at +Ottey (Ottery?) concerning them, and am in hopes through their means +and the assistance of other friends of sending Hartley to college. +Lady Beaumont has promised L30 a year for the purpose, and Poole L10. +I wrote to Coleridge three or four months ago, telling him that unless +he took some steps in providing for this object I must make the +application, and required his answer within a given term of three +weeks. He received the letter, and in his note by Mr.----promised to +answer it, but he has never taken any further notice of it. I have +acted with the advice of Wordsworth. The brothers, as I expected, +promise their concurrence, and I daily expect a letter stating to what +extent they will contribute." With this letter before him an impartial +biographer can hardly be expected to adopt the theory which has +commended itself to the filial piety of the Rev. Derwent Coleridge-- +namely, that it was through the father's "influence" that the sons +were sent to college. On a plain matter of fact such as this, one may +be permitted, without indelicacy, to uphold the conclusions compelled +by the evidence. Such expressions of opinion, on the other hand, as +that Coleridge's "separation from his family, brought about and +continued through the force of circumstances over which he had far +less control than has been commonly supposed, was in fact nothing else +but an ever-prolonged absence;" and that "from first to last he took +an affectionate, it may be said a passionate, interest in the welfare +of his children"--such expressions of mere opinion as these it may be +proper enough to pass by in respectful silence. + +The following year brought with it no improvement in the embarrassed +circumstances, no reform of the disordered life. Still domiciled with +Mr. Morgan at Calne, the self-made sufferer writes to Cottle: "You +will wish to know something of myself. In health I am not worse than +when at Bristol I was best; yet fluctuating, yet unhappy, in +circumstances poor indeed! I have collected my scattered and my +manuscript poems sufficient to make one volume. Enough I have to make +another. But, till the latter is finished, I cannot, without great loss +of character, publish the former, on account of the arrangement, +besides the necessity of correction. For instance, I earnestly wish to +begin the volumes with what has never been seen by any, however few, +such as a series of odes on the different sentences of the Lord's +Prayer, and, more than all this, to finish my greater work on +'Christianity considered as philosophy, and as the only philosophy.'" +Then follows a request for a loan of forty pounds on the security of +the MSS., an advance which Cottle declined to make, though he sent +Coleridge "some smaller temporary relief." The letter concludes with a +reference to a project for taking a house and receiving pupils to +hoard and instruct, which Cottle appeared to consider the crowning +"degradation and ignominy of all." + +A few days later we find Lord Byron again coming to Coleridge's +assistance with a loan of a hundred pounds and words of counsel and +encouragement. Why should not the author of Remorse repeat his success +I "In Kean," writes Byron, "there is an actor worthy of expressing the +thoughts of the character which you have every power of embodying, and +I cannot but regret that the part of Ordonio was disposed of before +his appearance at Drury Lane. We have had nothing to be mentioned in +the same breath with Remorse for very many years, and I should think +that the reception of that play was sufficient to encourage the +highest hopes of author and audience." The advice was followed, and +the drama of Zapolya was the result. It is a work of even less dramatic +strength than its predecessor, and could scarcely, one thinks, have +been as successful with an audience. It was not, however, destined to +see the footlights. Before it had passed the tribunal of the Drury +Lane Committee it had lost the benefit of Byron's patronage through +the poet's departure from England, and the play was rejected by Mr. +Douglas Kinnaird, the then reader for the theatre, who assigned, +according to Mr. Gillman, "some ludicrous objections to the +metaphysics." Before leaving England, however, Byron rendered a last, +and, as the result proved, a not unimportant service to his brother- +poet. He introduced him to Mr. Murray, who, in the following year, +undertook the publication of _Christabel_--the most successful, +in the sense of the most popular, of all its author's productions in +verse. + +With the coming of spring in the following year that dreary story of +slow self-destruction, into which the narrative of Coleridge's life +from the age of thirty to that of forty-five resolves itself, was +brought to a close. Coleridge had at last perceived that his only hope +of redemption lay in a voluntary submission of his enfeebled will to +the control of others, and he had apparently just enough strength of +volition to form and execute the necessary resolve. He appears, in the +first instance, to have consulted a physician of the name of Adams, +who, on the 9th of April 1816, put himself in communication with Mr. +Gillman of Highgate. "A very learned, but in one respect an +unfortunate gentleman, has," he wrote, "applied to me on a singular +occasion. He has for several years been in the habit of taking large +quantities of opium. For some time past he has been in vain +endeavouring to break himself of it. It is apprehended his friends are +not firm enough, from a dread lest he should suffer by suddenly +leaving it off, though he is conscious of the contrary, and has +proposed to me to submit himself to any regimen, however severe. With +this view he wishes to fix himself in the house of some medical +gentleman who will have the courage to refuse him any laudanum, and +under whose assistance, should he be the worse for it, he may be +relieved." Would such a proposal, inquires the writer, be absolutely +inconsistent with Mr. Gillman's family arrangements? He would not, he +adds, have proposed it "but on account of the great importance of the +character as a literary man. His communicative temper will make his +society very interesting as well as useful." Mr. Gillman's +acquaintance with Dr. Adams was but slight, and he had had no previous +intention of receiving an inmate into his house. But the case very +naturally interested him; he sought an interview with Dr. Adams, and it +was agreed that the latter should drive Coleridge to Highgate the +following evening. At the appointed hour, however, Coleridge presented +himself alone, and, after spending the evening at Mr. Gillman's, left +him, as even in his then condition he left most people who met him for +the first time, completely captivated by the amiability of his manners +and the charm of his conversation. The next day Mr. Gillman received +from him a letter, finally settling the arrangement to place himself +under the doctor's care, and concluding with the following pathetic +passage: + +"And now of myself. My ever wakeful reason and the keenness of my +moral feelings will secure you from all unpleasant circumstances +connected with me save only one, viz. the evasion of a specific +madness. You will never hear anything but truth from me; prior habits +render it out of my power to tell an untruth, but, unless carefully +observed, I dare not promise that I should not, with regard to this +detested poison, be capable of acting one. Not sixty hours have yet +passed without my having taken laudanum, though, for the last week, +comparatively trifling doses. I have full belief that your anxiety +need not be extended beyond the first week, and for the first week, I +shall not, must not, be permitted to leave your house, unless with +you; delicately or indelicately, this must be done, and both the +servants, and the assistant, must receive absolute commands from you. +The stimulus of conversation suspends the terror that haunts my mind; +but, when I am alone, the horrors I have suffered from laudanum, the +degradation, the blighted utility, almost overwhelm me. If (as I feel +for the _first time_ a soothing confidence that it will prove) I +should leave you restored to my moral and bodily health, it is not +myself only that will love and honour you; every friend I have (and, +thank God! in spite of this wretched vice I have many and warm ones, +who were friends of my youth, and have never deserted me) will thank +you with reverence. I have taken no notice of your kind apologies. If +I could not be comfortable in your house and with your family, I +should deserve to be miserable." + +This letter was written on a Saturday, and on the following Monday +Coleridge presented himself at Mr. Gillman's, bringing in his hand the +proof--sheets of _Christabel_, now printed for the first time. He +had looked, as the letter just quoted shows, with a "soothing +confidence" to leaving his retreat at some future period in a restored +condition of moral and bodily health; and as regards the restoration, +his confidence was in a great measure justified. But the friendly doors +which opened to receive him on this 15th of April 1816, were destined +to close only upon his departing bier. Under the watchful and almost +reverential care of this well-chosen guardian, sixteen years of +comparatively quiet and well-ordered life, of moderate but effective +literary activity, and of gradual though never complete emancipation +from his fatal habit, were reserved to him. He had still, as we shall +see, to undergo certain recurrences of restlessness and renewals of +pecuniary difficulty; his shattered health was but imperfectly and +temporarily repaired; his "shaping spirit of imagination" could not and +did not return; his transcendental broodings became more and more the +"habit of his soul." But henceforth he recovers for us a certain +measure of his long-lost dignity, and a figure which should always +have been "meet for the reverence of the hearth" in the great +household of English literature, but which had far too long and too +deeply sunk below it, becomes once more a worthy and even a venerable +presence. At evening-time it was light. + + +FOOTNOTES + +1. Coleridge made the acquaintance of this gentleman, who became his +enthusiastic disciple, in 1818. His chief interest for us is the fact +that for the next seven years he was Coleridge's correspondent. +Personally, he was a man of little judgment or critical discrimination, +and his sense of the ridiculous may be measured by the following +passage. Speaking of the sweetness of Charles Lamb's smile, he says +that "there is still one man living, a stockbroker, who has that +smile," and adds: "To those who wish to see the only thing left on +earth, _if it is still left_, of Lamb, his best and most beautiful +remain--his smile, I will indicate its possessor, Mr.---- of Throgmorton +Street." How the original "possessor" of this apparently assignable +security would have longed to "feel Mr. Allsop's head"! + + + + +CHAPTER IX + +Life at Highgate-Renewed activity-Publications and re-publications--The +_Biographia Literaria_--The lectures of 1818-Coleridge as a +Shakespearian critic. + +[1816-1818.] + + +The results of the step which Coleridge had just taken became speedily +visible in more ways than one, and the public were among the first to +derive benefit from it. For not only was he stimulated to greater +activity of production, but his now more methodical way of life gave +him time and inclination for that work of arrangement and preparation +for the press which, distasteful to most writers, was no doubt +especially irksome to him, and thus insured the publication of many +pieces which otherwise might never have seen the light. The appearance +of _Christabel_ was, as we have said, received with signal marks of +popular favour, three editions being called for and exhausted in the +same year. In 1816 there appeared also The Statesman's Manual; or the +Bible the best guide to Political Skill and Foresight: a Lay Sermon +addressed to the higher classes of Society, with an Appendix containing +Comments and Essays connected with the Study of the Inspired Writings; +in 1817, another _Lay Sermon addressed to the higher and middle +classes on the existing distresses and discontents;_ and in the same +year followed the most important publication of this period, the +_Biographia Literaria_. + +In 1817, too, it was that Coleridge at last made his long-meditated +collection and classification of his already published poems, and that +for the first time something approaching to a complete edition of the +poet's works was given to the world. The _Sibylline Leaves_, as +this reissue was called, had been intended to be preceded by another +volume of verse, and "accordingly on the printer's signatures of every +sheet we find Vol. II, appearing." Too characteristically, however, +the scheme was abandoned, and Volume II. emerged from the press +without any Volume I. to accompany it. The drama of _Zapolya_ +followed in the same year, and proved more successful with the public +than with the critic of Drury Lane. The "general reader" assigned no +"ludicrous objections to its metaphysics;" on the contrary, he took +them on trust, as his generous manner is, and _Zapolya_, published +thus as a Christmas tale, became so immediately popular that two +thousand copies were sold in six weeks. In the year 1818 followed the +three-volume selection of essays from the _Friend_, a reissue to +which reference has already been made. With the exception of +_Christabel_, however, all the publications of these three years +unfortunately proceeded from the house of Gale and Fenner, a firm +which shortly afterwards became bankrupt; and Coleridge thus lost all +or nearly all of the profits of their sale. + +The most important of the new works of this period was, as +has been said, the _Biographia Literaria_, or, to give it its +other title, _Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life and +Opinions_. Its interest, however, is wholly critical and +illustrative; as a narrative it would be found extremely disappointing +and probably irritating by the average reader. With the exception of +one or two incidental disclosures, but little biographical information +is to be derived from it which is not equally accessible from sources +independent of the author; and the almost complete want of sequence and +arrangement renders it a very inconvenient work of reference even for +these few biographical details. Its main value is to be found in the +contents of seven chapters, from the fourteenth to the twentieth; but +it is not going too far to say that, in respect of these, it is +literally priceless. No such analysis of the principles of poetry--no +such exact discrimination of what was sound in the modern "return-to- +nature" movement from what was false--has ever been accomplished by any +other critic, or with such admirable completeness by this consummate +critic at any other time. Undoubtedly it is not of the light order of +reading; none, or very little, of Coleridge's prose is. The whole of +chapter xv., for instance, in which the specific elements of "poetic +power" are "distinguished from general talent determined to poetic +composition by accidental motives," requires a close and sustained +effort of the attention, but those who bestow it will find it amply re- +paid. I know of no dissertation conceived and carried out in terms of +the abstract which in the result so triumphantly justifies itself upon +application to concrete cases, As regards the question of poetic +expression, and the laws by which its true form is determined, +Coleridge's analysis is, it seems to me, final. I cannot, at least, +after the most careful reflection upon it, conceive it as being other +than the absolutely last word on the subject. Reasoning and +illustration are alike so convincing that the reader, like the +contentious student who listened unwillingly to his professor's +demonstration of the first proposition of Euclid, is compelled to +confess that "he has nothing to reply." To the judicious admirer of +Wordsworth, to every one who, while recognising Wordsworth's +inestimable services to English literature as the leader of the +naturalist reaction in poetry, has yet been vaguely conscious of the +defect in his poetic theory, and very keenly conscious of the vices of +his poetic practice,--to all such persons it must be a profound relief +and satisfaction to be guided as unerringly as Coleridge guides them to +the "parting of the ways" of truth and falsity in Wordsworth's +doctrines, and to be enabled to perceive that nothing which has +offended him in that poet's thought and diction has any real connection +with whatever in the poet's principles has commanded his assent. There +is no one who has ever felt uneasy under the blasphemies of the enemy +but must entertain deep gratitude for so complete a discharge as +Coleridge has procured him from the task of defending such lines as + + "And I have travelled far as Hull to see + What clothes he might have left or other property." + +Defend them indeed the ordinary reader probably would not, preferring +even the abandonment of his theory to a task so humiliating. But the +theory has so much of truth and value in it that the critic who has +redeemed it from the discredit of Wordsworth's misapplications of it is +entitled to the thanks of every friend of simplicity, who is at the +same time an enemy of bathos. There is no longer any reason to treat +the deadly commonplaces, amid which we toil through so many pages of +the _Excursion_, as having any true theoretic affinity with its +but too occasional majestic interludes. The smooth square-cut blocks of +prose which insult the natural beauty of poetic rock and boulder even +in such a scene of naked moorland grandeur as that of _Resolution and +Independence_ are seen and shown to be the mere intruders which we +have all felt them to be. To the Wordsworthian, anxious for a full +justification of the faith that is in him, the whole body of +Coleridge's criticism on his friend's poetry in the _Biographia +Literaria_ may be confidently recommended. The refutation of what is +untenable in Wordsworth's theory, the censure pronounced upon certain +characteristics of his practice, are made all the more impressive by +the tone of cordial admiration which distinguishes every personal +reference to the poet himself, and by the unfailing discrimination with +which the critic singles out the peculiar beauties of his poetry. No +finer selection of finely characteristic Wordsworthian passages could +perhaps have been made than those which Coleridge has quoted in +illustration of his criticisms in the eighteenth and two following +chapters of the _Biographia Literaria_. For the rest, however, +unless indeed one excepts the four chapters on the Hartleian system and +its relation to the German school of philosophy, the book is rather one +to be dipped into for the peculiar pleasure which an hour in +Coleridge's company must always give to any active intelligence, than +to be systematically studied with a view to perfecting one's conception +of Coleridge's philosophical and critical genius considered in its +totality. + +As to the two lay sermons, the less ambitious of them is decidedly the +more successful. The advice to "the higher and middle classes" on the +existing distresses and discontents contains at least an ingredient of +the practical; its distinctively religious appeals are varied by sound +political and economical arguments; and the enumeration and exposure of +the various artifices by which most orators are accustomed to delude +their hearers is as masterly as only Coleridge could have made it. Who +but he, for instance, could have thrown a piece of subtle observation +into a form in which reason and fancy unite so happily to impress it +on the mind as in the following passage: "The mere appeal to the +auditors, whether the arguments are not such that none but an idiot or +an hireling could resist, is an effective substitute for any argument +at all. For mobs have no memories. They are in nearly the same state +as that of an individual when he makes what is termed a bull. _The +passions, like a fused metal, fill up the wide interstices of thought +and supply the defective links; and thus incompatible assertions are +harmonised by the sensation, without the sense of connection_." The +other lay sermon, however, the _Statesman's Manual_, is less +appropriately conceived. Its originating proposition, that the Bible is +"the best guide to political skill and foresight," is undoubtedly open +to dispute, but might nevertheless be capable of plausible defence upon +_a priori_ grounds. Coleridge, however, is not content with this +method of procedure; as, indeed, with so avowedly practical an object +in view he scarcely could be, for a "manual" is essentially a work +intended for the constant consultation of the artificer in the actual +performance of his work, and ought at least to contain illustrations of +the application of its general principles to particular cases. It is in +undertaking to supply these that the essential mysticism of Coleridge's +counsels comes to light. For instance: "I am deceived if you will not be +compelled to admit that the prophet Isaiah revealed the true philosophy +of the French Revolution more than two thousand years before it became a +sad irrevocable truth of history. 'And thou saidst, I shall be a lady +for ever, so that thou didst not lay these things to thy heart neither +didst remember the latter end of it.... Therefore shall evil come upon +thee; thou shalt not know from whence it riseth, etc.'" And to this +ast-quoted sentence Coleridge actually appends the following note: "The +reader will scarcely fail to find in this verse a remembrancer of the +sudden setting in of the frost before the usual time (in a country, +too, where the commencement of its two seasons is in general scarcely +less regular than that of the wet and dry seasons between the tropics) +which caused, and the desolation which accompanied, the flight from +Moscow." One can make no other comment upon this than that if it really + be wisdom which statesmen would do well to lay to heart, the late Dr. +Cumming must have been the most profound instructor in statesmanship +that the world has ever seen. A prime minister of real life, however, +could scarcely be seriously recommended to shape his policy upon a due +consideration of the possible allegoric meaning of a passage in Isaiah, +to say nothing of the obvious objection that this kind of appeal to +_Sortes Biblicae_ is dangerously liable to be turned against those who +recommend it. On the whole, one must say of this lay sermon that it +justifies the apprehension expressed by the author in its concluding +pages. It does rather "resemble the overflow of an earnest mind than an +orderly and premeditated," in the sense, at any rate, of a well- +considered "composition." + +In the month of January 1818 Coleridge once more commenced the delivery +of a course of lectures in London. The scope of this series-fourteen in +number was, as will be seen from the subjoined syllabus, an immensely +comprehensive one. The subject of the first was "the manners, morals, +literature, philosophy, religion, and state of society in general in +European Christendom, from the eighth to the fifteenth century;" and of +the second "the tales and metrical romances common for the most part to +England, Germany, and the north of France; and English songs and ballads +continued to the reign of Charles I." In the third the lecturer proposed +to deal with the poetry of Chaucer and Spenser, of Petrarch, and of +Ariosto, Pulci, and Boiardo. The fourth, fifth, and sixth were to be +devoted to the dramatic works of Shakespeare, and to comprise the +substance of Coleridge's former courses on the same subject, "enlarged +and varied by subsequent study and reflection." In the seventh he was +to treat of the other principal dramatists of the Elizabethan period, +Ben Jonson, Massinger, and Beaumont and Fletcher; in the eighth of the +life and all the works of Cervantes; in the ninth of Rabelais, Swift, +and Sterne, with a dissertation "on the nature and constituents of +genuine humour, and on the distinctions of humorous from the witty, the +fanciful, the droll, the odd, etc." Donne, Dante, and Milton formed the +subject of the tenth; the _Arabian Nights Entertainment_, and the +_romantic_ use of the supernatural in poetry, that of the eleventh. +The twelfth was to be on "tales of witches and apparitions, etc.," as +distinguished from magic and magicians of Asiatic origin; and the +thirteenth,--"on colour, sound, and form in nature, as connected with +Poesy--the word 'Poesy' being used as the generic or class term +including poetry, music, painting, statuary, and ideal architecture as +its species, the reciprocal relations of poetry and philosophy to each +other, and of both to religion and the moral sense.'" In the fourteenth +and final lecture Coleridge proposed to discuss "the corruptions of the +English language since the reign of Queen Anne, in our style of writing +prose," and to formulate "a few easy rules for the attainment of a +manly, unaffected, and pure language in our genuine mother tongue, +whether for the purposes of writing, oratory, or conversation." + +These lectures, says Mr. Gillman, were from Coleridge's own account +more profitable than any he had before given, though delivered in an +unfavourable situation; a lecture-room in Flower de Luce Court, which, +however, being near the Temple, secured to him the benefit--if benefit +it were--of a considerable number of law students among his auditors. +It was the first time that his devoted guardian had ever heard him in +public, and he reports the significant fact that though Coleridge +lectured from notes, which he had carefully made, "it was obvious that +his audience were more delighted when, putting his notes aside, he +spoke extempore...." He was brilliant, fluent, and rapid; his words +seemed to flow as from a person repeating with grace and energy some +delightful poem. If he sometimes paused, it was not for the want of +words, but that he was seeking their most appropriate or most logical +arrangement. + +An incident related with extreme, though in a great measure +unconscious, drollery by Mr. Gillman in connection with a +lecture delivered at this period is to my mind of more assistance +than many of the accounts of his "lay sermons" in private circles, in +enabling us to comprehend one element of Coleridge's marvellous powers +of discourse. Early one morning at Mr. Gillman's he received two +letters-one to inform him that he was expected that same evening to +deliver a lecture, at the rooms of the London Philosophical Society, +to an audience of some four or five hundred persons; the other +containing a list of the previous lecturers and the lectures delivered +by them during the course of the season. At seven o'clock in the +evening Coleridge and Mr. Gillman went up to town to make some +inquiries respecting this unexpected application; but, on arriving at +the house of the gentleman who had written the letter, they were +informed that he was not at home, but would return at eight o'clock-- +the hour fixed for the commencement of the lecture. They then +proceeded to the Society's rooms, where in due time the audience +assembled; and the committee having at last entered and taken their +places on the seats reserved for them, "Mr. President arose from +the centre of the group, and, putting on a 'president's hat,' which +so disfigured him that we could scarcely refrain from laughter, +addressed the company in these words: This evening Mr. Coleridge +will deliver a lecture on 'the Growth of the Individual Mind.'" +Coleridge at first "seemed startled," as well he might, and turning +round to Mr. Gillman whispered: "A pretty stiff subject they have +chosen for me." However, he instantly mounted his standing-place and +began without hesitation, previously requesting his friend to observe +the effect of his lecture on the audience. It was agreed that, should +he appear to fail, Gillman was to "clasp his ancle; but that he was to +continue for an hour if the countenances of his auditors indicated +satisfaction." Coleridge then began his address in these words: "The +lecture I am about to give this evening is purely extempore. Should +you find a nominative case looking out for a verb, or a fatherless +verb for a nominative case, you must excuse it. It is purely extempore, +though I have read and thought much on the subject." At this the +company smiled, which seemed to inspire the lecturer with confidence. +He plunged at once into his lecture--and most brilliant, eloquent, and +logically consecutive it was. The time moved on so swiftly that Mr. +Gillman found, on looking at his watch, that an hour and a half had +passed away, and, therefore, he continues "waiting only a desirable +moment--to use his own playful words--I prepared myself to punctuate +his oration. As previously agreed, I pressed his ancle, and thus gave +him the hint he had requested; when, bowing graciously, and with a +benevolent and smiling countenance, he presently descended. The lecture +was quite new to me, and I believe quite new to himself so far as the +arrangement of his words was concerned. The floating thoughts were +beautifully arranged, and delivered on the spur of the moment. What +accident gave rise to the singular request, that he should deliver +this lecture impromptu, I never learnt; nor did it signify, as it +afforded a happy opportunity to many of witnessing in part the extent +of his reading and the extraordinary strength of his powers." + +It is tantalising to think that no record of this remarkable performance +remains; but, indeed, the same may to some extent be said, and in +various degrees, of nearly all the lectures which Coleridge ever +delivered. With the exception of seven out of the fifteen of 1811, +which were published in 1856 by Mr. Payne Collier from shorthand notes +taken at the time, Coleridge's lectures scarcely exist for us otherwise +than in the form of rough preparatory notes. A few longer pieces, such +as the admirable observations in the second volume of the _Literary +Remains_, on poetry, on the Greek drama, and on the progress of the +dramatic art in England, are, with the exception above noticed, almost +the only general disquisitions on these subjects which appear to have +reached us in a complete state. Of the remaining contents of the +volume, including the detailed criticisms now textual, now analytic--of +the various plays of Shakespeare, a considerable portion is frankly +fragmentary, pretending, indeed, to no other character than that of +mere marginalia. This, however, does not destroy--I had almost said it +does not even impair--their value. It does but render them all the more +typical productions of a writer, whose greatest services to mankind in +almost every department of human thought and knowledge with which he +concerned himself were much the most often performed in the least +methodical way. In reading through these incomparable notes on +Shakespeare we soon cease to lament, or even to remember, their +unconnected form and often somewhat desultory appearance; if, indeed, +we do not see reason to congratulate ourselves that the annotator, +unfettered by the restraints which the composition of a systematic +treatise would have imposed upon him, is free to range with us at will +over many a flower-strewn field, for which otherwise he could not +perhaps have afforded to quit the main road of his subject. And this +liberty is the more welcome, because Coleridge, _primus inter +pares_ as a critic of any order of literature, is in the domain of +Shakespearian commentary absolute king. The principles of analysis +which he was charged with having borrowed without acknowledgment from +Schlegel, with whose Shakespearian theories he was at the time entirely +unacquainted, were in fact of his own excogitation. He owed nothing in +this matter to any individual German, nor had he anything in common +with German Shakespearianism except its profoundly philosophising +spirit, which, moreover, was in his case directed and restrained by +other qualities, too often wanting in critics of that industrious race; +for he possessed a sense of the ridiculous, a feeling for the poetic, a +tact, a taste, and a judgment, which would have saved many a worthy but +heavy-handed Teutonic professor, who should have been lucky enough to +own these gifts, from exposing himself and his science to the satire of +the light-minded. Very rarely, indeed, do we find Coleridge indulging +_plus 'quo_ his passion for psychological analysis. Deeply as his +criticism penetrates, it is yet loyally recognitive of the opacity of +milestones. Far as he sees into his subject, we never find him fancying +that he sees beyond the point at which the faculty of human vision is +exhausted. His conception of the more complex of Shakespeare's +personages, his theory of their characters, his reading of their +motives, is often subtle, but always sane; his interpretation of the +master's own dealings with them, and of the language which he puts into +their mouths, is often highly imaginative, but it is rarely fanciful. +Take, as an illustration of the first-mentioned merit, the following +acute but eminently sensible estimate of the character of Polonius:-- + + +"He is the personified memory of wisdom no longer actually possessed. +This admirable character is always misrepresented on the stage. +Shakspeare never intended to exhibit him as a buffoon; for although it +was natural for Hamlet--a young man of fire and genius, detesting +formality and disliking Polonius on political grounds, as imagining +that he had assisted his uncle in his usurpation--should express +himself satirically, yet this must not be taken exactly as the poet's +conception of him. In Polonius a certain induration of character had +arisen from long habits of business; but take his advice to Laertes, +and Ophelia's reverence for his memory, and we shall see that he was +meant to be represented as a statesman somewhat past his faculties--his +recollections of life all full of wisdom, and showing a knowledge of +human nature, while what immediately takes place before him and escapes +from him is indicative of weakness." + +Or this comment on the somewhat faint individualisation of the figure of +Lear: + +"In Lear old age is itself a character-natural imperfections being +increased by life-long habits of receiving a prompt obedience. Any +addition of individualisation would have been unnecessary and painful; +for the relation of others to him, of wondrous fidelity and of frightful +ingratitude, alone sufficiently distinguish him. Thus Lear becomes the +open and ample playroom of nature's passions." + +Or lastly, in illustration of my second point, let us take this note on +the remark of the knight that "since my young lady's going into France the +fool hath much pined away ":-- + +"The fool is no comic buffoon--to make the groundlings laugh--no forced +condescension of Shakspeare's genius to the taste of his audience. +Accordingly the poet prepares us for the introduction, which he never does +with any of his common clowns and fools, by bringing him into living +connection with the pathos of the play. He is as wonderful a creation as +Caliban,--his wild babblings and inspired idiocy articulate and gauge the +horrors of the scene." + +The subject is a tempting one to linger over, did not imperative +Exigencies of space compel me to pass on from it. There is much--very +much--more critical matter in the Literary Remains of which it is hard to +forbear quotation; and I may mention in particular the profoundly +suggestive remarks on the nature of the humorous, with their accompanying +analysis of the genius and artistic method of Sterne. But it is, as has +been said, in Shakespearian criticism that Coleridge's unique mastery of +all the tools of the critic is most conspicuous, and it is in the +brilliant, if unmethodised, pages which I have been discussing that we +may most readily find consolation for the too early silencing of his +muse. For these consummate criticisms are essentially and above all the +criticisms of a poet They are such as could not have been achieved by +any man not originally endowed with that divine gift which was fated in +this instance to expend itself within so few years. Nothing, indeed, +could more strikingly illustrate the commanding advantage possessed by +a poet interpreting a poet than is to be found in Coleridge's +occasional sarcastic comments on the _banalites_ of our national +poet's most prosaic commentator, Warburton--the "thought-swarming, but +idealess Warburton," as he once felicitously styles him. The one man +seems to read his author's text under the clear, diffused, unwavering +radiance emitted from his own poetic imagination; while the criticism +of the other resembles a perpetual scratching of damp matches, which +ash a momentary light into one corner of the dark assage, and then go +out. + + + + +CHAPTER X + +Closing years--Temporary renewal of money troubles--The Aids to Reflection +--Growing weakness-Visit to Germany with the Wordsworths--Last illness +and death. + +[1818-1834.] + + +For the years which now remained to Coleridge, some sixteen in number, +dating from his last appearance as a public lecturer, his life would +seem to have been attended with something, at least, of that sort of +happiness which is enjoyed by the nation of uneventful annals. There is +little to be told of him in the way of literary performance; little +record remains, unfortunately, of the discursively didactic talk in +which, during these years, his intellectual activity found its busiest +exercise; of incident in the ordinary sense of the word there is almost +none. An account of these closing days of his life must resolve itself +almost wholly into a "history of opinion,"--an attempt to reanimate for +ourselves that life of perpetual meditation which Coleridge lived, and +to trace, so far as the scanty evidence of his utterances enables us to +do so, the general tenor of his daily thoughts. From one point of view, +of course, this task would be extremely difficult, if not impossible; +from another comparatively easy. It is easy, that is to say, to +investigate Coleridge's speculations, so far as their subject is +concerned, whatever difficulties their obscurity and subtlety may +present to the inquirer; for, as a matter of fact, their subject is +remarkably uniform. Attempts to divide the literary life of a writer +into eras are more often arbitrary and fanciful than not; but the +peculiar circumstances of Coleridge's career did in fact effect the +division for themselves. His life until the age of twenty-six may +fairly be described as in its "poetic period." It was during these +years, and indeed during the last two or three of them, that he +produced all the poetry by which he will be remembered, while he +produced little else of mark or memorability. The twenty years which +follow from 1798 to 1818 may with equal accuracy be styled the +"critical period." It was during these years that he did his best work +as a journalist, and all his work as a public lecturer on aesthetics. +It was during them that he said his say, and even his final say, so far +as any public modes of expression were concerned, on politics and on +art. From 1818 to his death his life was devoted entirely to +metaphysics and theology, and with such close and constant reference to +the latter subject, to which indeed his metaphysics had throughout his +life been ancillary, that it deserves to give the name of the +"theological period" to these closing years. + +Their lack of incident, however, is not entirely as favourable a +circumstance as that uneventfulness of national annals to which I have +compared it; for, though "no news may be good news" in the case of a +nation's history, it is by no means as certainly so in the case of a +man's biography, and, least of all, when the subject is a man whose +inward life of thought and feeling so completely overshadowed his outward +life of action throughout his whole career. There is indeed evidence, +slight in amount, but conclusive in character-plain and painful evidence +enough to show that at least the first four or five years of the period we +have mentioned were not altogether years of resignation and calm; that +they were embittered by recurring agonies of self-reproach, by + + "Sense of past youth, and manhood come in vain, + And genius given, and knowledge won in vain;" + +and by the desolating thought that all which had been "culled in wood- +walks wild," and "all which patient toil had reared," were to be + + --"but flowers + Strewn on the corse, and borne upon the bier, + In the same coffin, for the self-same grave!" + +Here and there in the correspondence with Thomas Allsop we obtain a +glimpse into that vast half-darkened arena in which this captive spirit +self-condemned to the lions was struggling its last. To one strange and +hitherto unexplained letter I have already referred. It was written +from Ramsgate in the autumn of 1822, evidently under circumstances of +deep depression. But there is a letter nearly two years earlier in date +addressed to the same correspondent which contains by far the fullest +account of Coleridge's then condition of mind, the state of his +literary engagements and his literary projects, his completed and +uncompleted work. As usual with him it is stress of money matters that +prompts him to write, and he prefaces his request for assistance with +the following portentous catalogue of realised or contemplated schemes. +"Contemplated," indeed, is too modest a word, according to his own +account, to be applied to any one item in the formidable list. Of all +of them, he has, he tells Allsop, "already the written materials and +contents, requiring only to be put together from the loose papers and +commonplace in memorandum books, and needing no other change, whether +of omission, addition, or correction, than the mere act of arranging, +and the opportunity of seeing the whole collectively, bring with them +of course." Heads I. and II. of the list comprise those criticisms on +Shakespeare and the other principal Elizabethan dramatists; on Dante, +Spenser, Milton, Cervantes, Calderon; on Chaucer, Ariosto, Donne, +Rabelais, etc., which formed the staple of the course of lectures +delivered in 1818, and which were published after his death in the +first two of the four volumes of _Literary Remains_ brought out +under the editorship of Mr. H. N. Coleridge. Reserving No. III. for a +moment we find No. IV. to consist of "Letters on the Old and New +Testament, and on the Doctrines and Principles held in common by the +Fathers and Founders of the Reformation, addressed to a Candidate for +Holy Orders, including advice on the plan and subjects of preaching +proper to a minister of the Established Church." The letters never +apparently saw the light of publicity, at any rate, in the epistolary +form, either during the author's lifetime or after his death; and with +regard to II. and III., which did obtain posthumous publication, the +following caution should be borne in mind by the reader. "To the +completion," says Coleridge, "of these four works I have literally +nothing more to do than to transcribe; but, as I before hinted, from so +many scraps and Sibylline leaves, including margins of blank pages that +unfortunately I must be my own scribe, and, not done by myself, they +will be all but lost." As matters turned out he was not his own scribe, +and the difficulty which Mr. Nelson Coleridge experienced in piecing +together the fragmentary materials at his disposal is feelingly +described by him in his preface to the first edition. He added that the +contents of these volumes were drawn from a portion only of the MSS. +entrusted to him, and that the remainder of the collection, which, +under favourable circumstances, he hoped might hereafter see the +light, "was at least of equal value" with what he was then presenting to +the reader. This hope was never realised; and it must be remembered, +therefore, that the published record of Coleridge's achievements as a +critic is, as has already been pointed out, extremely imperfect. [1] +That it is not even more disappointingly so than it is, may well +entitle his nephew and editor to the gratitude of posterity; but where +much has been done, there yet remains much to do ere Coleridge's +consummate analyses of poetic and dramatic works can be presented to +the reader in other than their present shape of a series of detached +brilliancies. The pearls are there, but the string is wanting. Whether +it will be ever supplied, or whether it is possible now to supply it, +one cannot say. + +The third of Coleridge's virtually completed works there is much virtue +in a "virtually"-was a "History of Philosophy considered as a Tendency +of the Human Mind to exhibit the Powers of the Human Reason, to +discover by its own strength the Origin and Laws of Man and the World, +from Pythagoras to Locke and Condillac." This production, however, +considerable as it is, was probably merely ancillary to what he calls +"My GREAT WORK, to the preparation of which more than twenty years of +my life have been devoted, and on which my hopes of extensive and +permanent utility, of fame in the noblest sense of the word, mainly +rest." To this work he goes on to say: + +"All my other writings, unless I except my Poems (and these I can +exclude in part only), are introductory and preparative, while its +result, if the premises be as I with the most tranquil assurance am +convinced they are-incontrovertible, the deductions legitimate, and the +conclusions commensurate, and only commensurate with both [must be], to +effect a revolution in all that has been called Philosophy and +Metaphysics in England and France since the era of commencing +predominance of the mechanical system at the Restoration of our Second +Charles, and with [in] the present fashionable views not only of +religion, morals, and politics, but even of the modern physics and +physiology." + +This, it must be allowed, is a sufficiently "large order," being +Apparently indeed nothing less than an undertaking to demolish the +system of Locke and his successors, and to erect German +Transcendentalism on the ruins. With anything less than this, however +with any less noble object or less faith in their attainments-- +Coleridge could not, he declares, have stood acquitted of folly and +abuse of time, talent, and learning, on a labour of three--fourths of +his intellectual life. Somewhat more than a volume of this _magnum +opus_ had been dictated by him to his "friend and enlightened pupil, +Mr. Green, so as to exist fit for the press;" and more than as much +again had been done, but he had been compelled to break off the weekly +meetings with his pupil from the necessity of writing on subjects of +the passing day. Then comes a reference, the last we meet with, to the +real "great work," as the unphilosophic world has always considered and +will always consider it. On this subject he says: + +"Of my poetic works I would fain finish the _Christabel_, Alas! +for the proud time when I planned, when I had present to my mind the +materials as well as the scheme of the Hymns entitled Spirit, Sun, +Earth, Air, Water, Fire, and Man; and the Epic Poem on what appears to +me the only fit subject remaining for an Epic Poem--Jerusalem besieged +and destroyed by Titus." + +And then there follows this most pathetic passage, necessary, in spite +of its length, to be transcribed entire, both on account of the value +of its biographic details--its information on the subject of the useless +worldly affairs, etc.--and because of the singularly penetrating light +which it throws upon the mental and moral nature of the man:-- + +"I have only by fits and starts ever prayed--I have not prevailed upon +myself to pray to God in sincerity and entireness for the fortitude +that might enable me to resign myself to the abandonment of all my +life's best hopes, to say boldly to myself, 'Gifted with powers +confessedly above mediocrity, aided by an education of which no less +from almost unexampled hardships and sufferings than from manifold and +peculiar advantages I have never yet found a parallel, I have devoted +myself to a life of unintermitted reading, thinking, meditating, and +observing, I have not only sacrificed all worldly prospects of wealth +and advancement, but have in my inmost soul stood aloof from temporary +reputation. In consequence of these toils and this self-dedication I +possess a calm and clear consciousness that in many and most important +departments of truth and beauty I have outstrode my contemporaries, +those at least of highest name, that the number of my. printed works +bear witness that I have not been idle, and the seldom acknowledged but +strictly _proveable_ effects of my labours appropriated to the +welfare of my age in the _Morning Post_ before the peace of +Amiens, in the _Courier_ afterwards, and in the serious and +various subjects of my lectures... (add to which the unlimited freedom +of my communications to colloquial life) may surely be allowed as +evidence that I have not been useless to my generation. But, from +circumstances, the main portion of my harvest is still on the ground, +ripe indeed and only waiting, a few for the sickle, but a large part +only for the _sheaving_ and carting and housing-but from all this +I must turn away and let them rot as they lie, and be as though they +never had been; for I must go and gather black berries and earth-nuts, +or pick mushrooms and gild oak-apples for the palate and fancies of +chance customers. I must abrogate the name of philosopher and poet, and +scribble as fast as I can and with as little thought as I can for +_Blackwood's Magazine_, or as I have been employed for the last +days in writing MS. sermons for lazy clergymen who stipulate that the +composition must be more than respectable.'... This" [_i.e._ to +say this to myself] "I have not yet had courage to do. My soul sickens +and my heart sinks, and thus oscillating between both" [forms of +activity--the production of permanent and of ephemeral work] "I do +neither--neither as it ought to be done to any profitable end." + +And his proposal for extricating himself from this distressing position +is that "those who think respectfully and hope highly of my power and +attainments should guarantee me a yearly sum for three or four years, +adequate to my actual support, with such comforts and decencies of +appearance as my health and habit have made necessaries, so that my +mind may be unanxious as far as the present time is concerned." Thus +provided for he would undertake to devote two-thirds of his time to +some one work of those above mentioned that is to say, of the first +four--and confine it exclusively to it till finished, while the +remaining third of his time he would go on maturing and completing his +"great work," and "(for, if but easy in my mind, I have no doubt either +of the reawakening power or of the kindling inclination) my +_Christabel_ and what else the happier hour may inspire." Mr. +Green, he goes on to say, had promised to contribute L30 to L40 yearly, +another pupil, "the son of one of my dearest old friends, L50," and L10 +or L20 could, he thought, be relied on from another. The whole amount +of the required annuity would be about L200, to be repaid of course +should disposal or sale of his works produce, or as far as they should +produce, the means. But "am I entitled," he asks uneasily, "have I a +_right_ to do this I Can I do it without moral degradation? And +lastly, can it be done without loss of character in the eyes of my +acquaintances and of my friends' acquaintances?" + +I cannot take upon myself to answer these painful questions. The reply +to be given to them must depend upon the judgment which each individual +student of this remarkable but unhappy career may pass upon it as a +whole; and, while it would be too much to expect that that judgment +should be entirely favourable, one may at least believe that a fair +allowance for those inveterate weaknesses of physical constitution +which so largely aggravated, if they did not wholly generate, the fatal +infirmities of Coleridge's moral nature, must materially mitigate the +harshness of its terms. + +The story of Coleridge's closing years is soon told. It is mainly a +record of days spent in meditation and discourse, in which character it +will be treated of more fully in a subsequent chapter. His literary +productions during the last fourteen years of his life were few in +number, and but one of them of any great importance. In 1821 he had +offered himself as an occasional contributor to _Blackwood's +Magazine_, but a series of papers promised by him to that periodical +were uncompleted, and his only two contributions (in October 1821 and +January 1822) are of no particular note. In May 1825 he read a paper on +the _Prometheus_ of 'schylus before the Royal Society of Literature; +but "the series of disquisitions respecting the Egyptian in connection +with the sacerdotal theology and in contrast with the mysteries of +ancient Greece," to which this essay had been announced as preparatory, +never made their appearance. In the same year, however, he published +one of the best known of his prose works, his _Aids to Reflection_. + +Of the success of this latest of Coleridge's more important +contributions to literature there can be no doubt. New editions of it +seem to have been demanded at regular intervals for some twenty years +after its first production, and it appears to have had during the same +period a relatively equal reissue in the United States. The Rev. Dr. +James Marsh, an American divine of some ability and reputation, +composed a preliminary essay (now prefixed to the fifth English +edition), in which he elaborately set forth the peculiar merits of the +work, and undertook to initiate the reader in the fittest and most +profitable method of making use of it. In these remarks the reverend +essayist insists more strongly on the spiritually edifying quality of +the _Aids_ than on their literary merits, and, for my own part, I +must certainly consider him right in doing so. As a religious manual it +is easy to understand how this volume of Coleridge's should have +obtained many and earnest readers. What religious manual, which shows +traces of spiritual insight, or even merely of pious yearnings after +higher and holier than earthly things, has ever failed to win such +readers among the weary and heavy-laden of the world? And that +Coleridge, a writer of the most penetrating glance into divine +mysteries, and writing always from a soul all tremulous, as it were, +with religious sensibility, should have obtained such readers in +abundance is not surprising. But to a critic and literary biographer I +cannot think that his success in this respect has much to say. For my +own part, at any rate, I find considerable difficulty in tracing it to +any distinctively literary origin. There seems to me to be less charm +of thought, less beauty of style, less even of Coleridge's seldom- +failing force of effective statement, in the _Aids to Reflection_ +than in almost any of his writings. Even the volume of some dozen short +chapters on the Constitution of the Church and State, published in +1830, as an "aid towards a right judgment in the late Catholic Kelief +Bill," appears to me to yield a more characteristic flavour of the +author's style, and to exhibit far more of his distinction of literary +workmanship than the earlier and more celebrated work. + +Among the acquaintances made by Coleridge after his retirement to Mr. +Gillman's was one destined to be of some importance to the history of +his philosophical work. It was that of a gentleman whose name has +already been mentioned in this chapter, Mr. Joseph Henry Green, +afterwards a distinguished surgeon and Fellow of the Royal Society, who +in his early years had developed a strong taste for metaphysical +speculation, going even so far as to devote one of his hard-earned +periods of professional holiday to a visit to Germany for the sake of +studying philosophy in that home of abstract thought. To him Coleridge +was introduced by his old Roman acquaintance, Ludwig Tieck, on one of +the latter's visits to England, and he became, as the extract above +quoted from Coleridge's correspondence shows, his enthusiastic disciple +and indefatigable fellow-worker. In the pursuit of their common studies +and in those weekly reunions of admiring friends which Coleridge, while +his health permitted it, was in the habit of holding, we may believe +that a considerable portion of these closing years of his life was +passed under happier conditions than he had been long accustomed to. It +is pleasant to read of him among his birds and flowers, and surrounded +by the ever-watchful tendance of the affectionate Gillmans, tranquil in +mind at any rate, if not at ease from his bodily ailments, and +enjoying, as far as enjoyment was possible to him, the peaceful close +of a stormy and unsettled day. For the years 1825-30, moreover, his +pecuniary circumstances were improved to the extent of L105 per annum, +obtained for him at the instance of the Royal Society of Literature, +and held by him till the death of George IV. + +Two incidents of his later years are, however, worthy of more special +mention--a tour up the Rhine, which he took in 1828, in company with +Wordsworth and his daughter; and, some years earlier, a meeting with +John Keats. "A loose, slack, not well dressed youth," it is recorded in +the _Table Talk,_ published after his death by his nephew, "met +Mr.------" (it was Mr. Green, of whom more hereafter) "and myself in a +lane near Highgate. Green knew him and spoke. It was Keats. He was +introduced to me, and stayed a minute or so. After he had left us a +little way, he came back and said, 'Let me carry away the memory, +Coleridge, of having pressed your hand.' 'There is death in that hand,' +I said to Green when Keats was gone; yet this was, I believe, before +the consumption showed itself distinctly." + +His own health, however, had been steadily declining in these latter +years, and the German tour with the Wordsworths must, I should imagine, +have been the last expedition involving any considerable exercise of +the physical powers which he was able to take. Within a year or so +afterwards his condition seems to have grown sensibly worse. In +November 1831 he writes that for eighteen months past his life had been +"one chain of severe sicknesses, brief and imperfect convalescences, +and capricious relapses." Henceforth he was almost entirely confined to +the sick-room. His faculties, however, still remained clear and +unclouded. The entries in the _Table Talk_ do not materially +dimmish in frequency. Their tone of colloquy undergoes no perceptible +variation; they continue to be as stimulating and delightful reading as +ever. Not till 11th July 1834 do we find any change; but here at last +we meet the shadow, deemed longer than it was in reality, of the +approaching end. "I am dying," said Coleridge, "but without expectation +of a speedy release. Is it not strange that, very recently, bygone +images and scenes of early life have stolen into my mind like breezes +blown from the spice-islands of Youth and Hope--those twin realities of +the phantom world! I do not add Love, for what is Love but Youth and +Hope embracing, and, so seen, as _one_.... Hooker wished to live +to finish his _Ecclesiastical Polity_--so I own I wish life and +strength had been spared to me to complete my _Philosophy._ For, +as God hears me, the originating, continuing, and sustaining wish and +design in my heart were to exalt the glory of His name; and, which is +the same thing in other words, to promote the improvement of mankind. +But _visum aliter Deo,_ and His will be done." + +The end was nearer than he thought. It was on the 11th of July, as has +been said, that he uttered these last words of gentle and pious +resignation. On that day fortnight he died. Midway, however, in this +intervening period, he knew that the "speedy release" which he had not +ventured to expect was close at hand. The death, when it came, was in +some sort emblematic of the life. Sufferings severe and constant, till +within thirty-six hours of the end: at the last peace. On the 25th of +July 1834 this sorely-tried, long-labouring, fate-marred and self- +marred life passed tranquilly away. The pitiful words of Kent over his +dead master rise irrepressibly to the lips-- + + "O let him pass: he hates him + Who would upon the rack of this tough world + Stretch him out longer." + +There might have been something to be said, though not by Kent, of the +weaknesses of Lear himself; but at such a moment compassion both for +the king and for the poet may well impose silence upon censure. + + +FOOTNOTES + +1. How imperfect, a comparison between estimated and actual bulk will +show. No. I. was, according to Coleridge's reckoning, to form three +volumes of 500 pages each. In the Literary Remains it fills less than +half of four volumes of little more than 400 pages each. + + + + +CHAPTER XI + +Coleridge's metaphysics and theology--The _Spiritual Philosophy_ +of Mr. Green. + + +In spite of all the struggles, the resolutions, and the entreaties +which displayed themselves so distressingly in the letter to Mr. +Allsop, quoted in the last chapter, it is doubtful whether Coleridge's +"great work" made much additional progress during the last dozen years +of his life. The weekly meeting with Mr. Green seems, according to the +latter's biographer, to have been resumed. Mr. Simon tells us that he +continued year after year to sit at the feet of his Gamaliel, getting +more and more insight into his opinions, until, in 1834, two events +occurred which determined the remaining course of Mr. Green's life. One +of these events, it is needless to say, was Coleridge's death; the +other was the death of his disciple's father, with the result of +leaving Mr. Green possessed of such ample means as to render him +independent of his profession. The language of Coleridge's will, +together, no doubt, with verbal communications which had passed, +imposed on Mr. Green what he accepted as an obligation to devote so far +as necessary the whole remaining strength and earnestness of his life +to the one task of systematising, developing, and establishing the +doctrines of the Coleridgian philosophy. Accordingly, in 1836, two +years after his master's death, he retired from medical practice, and +thenceforward, until his own death nearly thirty years afterwards, he +applied himself unceasingly to what was in a twofold sense a labour of +love. + +We are not, it seems from his biographer's account, to suppose that Mr. +Green's task was in any material degree lightened for him by his previous +collaboration with Coleridge. The latter had, as we have seen, declared +in his letter to Allsop that "more than a volume" of the great work had +been dictated by him to Mr. Green, so as to exist in a condition fit for +the press: but this, according to Mr. Simon, was not the case; and the +probability is therefore that "more than a volume" meant written material +equal in amount to more than a volume--of course, an entirely different +thing. Mr. Simon, at any rate, assures us that no available written +material existed for setting comprehensively before the public, in +Coleridge's own language, and in an argued form, the philosophical system +with which he wished his name to be identified. Instead of it there were +fragments--for the most part mutually inadaptable fragments, and +beginnings, and studies of special subjects, and numberless notes on the +margins and fly-leaves of books. + +With this equipment, such as it was, Mr. Green set to work to methodise +the Coleridgian doctrines, and to construct from them nothing less than +such a system of philosophy as should "virtually include the law and +explanation of all being, conscious and unconscious, and of all +correlativity and duty, and be applicable directly or by deduction to +whatsoever the human mind can contemplate--sensuous or supersensuous--of +experience, purpose, or imagination." Born under post-diluvian +conditions, Mr. Green was of course unable to accomplish his self- +proposed enterprise, but he must be allowed to have attacked his task +with remarkable energy. "Theology, ethics, politics and political +history, ethnology, language, aesthetics, psychology, physics, and the +allied sciences, biology, logic, mathematics, pathology, all these +subjects," declares his biographer, "were thoughtfully studied by him, in +at least their basial principles and metaphysics, and most were +elaborately written of, as though for the divisions of some vast +cyclop'dic work." At an early period of his labours he thought it +convenient to increase his knowledge of Greek; he began to study Hebrew +when more than sixty years old, and still later in life he took up +Sanscrit. It was not until he was approaching his seventieth year and +found his health beginning to fail him that Mr. Green seems to have felt +that his design, in its more ambitious scope, must be abandoned, and +that, in the impossibility of applying the Coleridgian system of +philosophy to all human knowledge, it was his imperative duty under his +literary trust to work out that particular application of it which its +author had most at heart. Already, in an unpublished work which he had +made it the first care of his trusteeship to compose, he had, though but +roughly and imperfectly, as he considered, exhibited the relation of his +master's doctrines to revealed religion, and it had now become time to +supersede this unpublished compendium, the _Religio Laici_, as he +had styled it, by a fuller elaboration of the great Coleridgian position, +that "Christianity, rightly understood, is identical with the highest +philosophy, and that, apart from all question of historical evidence, the +essential doctrines of Christianity are necessary and eternal truths of +reason--truths which man, by the vouchsafed light of Nature and without +aid from documents or tradition, may always and anywhere discover for +himself." To this work accordingly Mr. Green devoted the few remaining +years of his life, and, dying in 1863 at the age of seventy-two, left +behind him in MS. the work entitled _Spiritual Philosophy: founded on +the teaching of the late Samuel Taylor Coleridge,_ which was published +two years later, together with the memoir of the author, from which I +have quoted, by Mr. John Simon. It consists of two volumes, the first of +which is devoted to the exposition of the general principles of +Coleridge's philosophy, while the second is entirely theological, and +aims at indicating on principles for which the first volume has +contended, the essential doctrines of Christianity. + +The earlier chapters of this volume Mr. Green devotes to an exposition +(if indeed the word can be applied to what is really a catalogue of the +results of a transcendental intuition) of the essential difference +between the reason and the understanding--a distinction which Coleridge +has himself elsewhere described as preeminently the _gradus ad +philosophiam,_ and might well have called its _pons asinorum._ In +the second part of his first volume Mr. Green applies himself to the +establishment of a position which, fundamental as it must be accounted in +all philosophical speculations of this school, is absolutely vital to the +theology which Coleridge sought to erect upon a metaphysical basis. This +position is that the human will is to be regarded as the one ultimate +fact of self-consciousness. So long as man confines himself to the +contemplation of his percipient and reflective self alone--so long as he +attends only to those modes of consciousness which are produced in him by +the impressions of the senses and the operations of thought, he can never +hope to escape from the famous _reductio ad inscibile_ of Hume. He +can never affirm anything more than the existence of those modes of +consciousness, or assert, at least as a direct deliverance of intuition, +that his conscious self _is_ anything apart from the perceptions and +concepts to which he is attending. But when he turns from his perceiving +and thinking to his willing self he becomes for the first time aware of +something deeper than the mere objective presentations of consciousness; +he obtains a direct intuition of an originant, causative, and independent +self-existence. He will have attained in short to the knowledge of a +noumenon, and of the only knowable noumenon. The barrier, elsewhere +insuperable between the subject and object, is broken down; that which +_knows_ becomes identified with that which _is;_ and in the +consciousness of will the consciousness also of a self, as something +independent of and superior to its own modifications, is not so much +affirmed as acquired. The essence, in short, of the Coleridgian ontology +consists in the alteration of a single though a very important word in +the well-known Cartesian formula. _Cogito ergo sum_ had been shown +by Hume to involve an illicit process of reasoning. Descartes, according +to the Scottish sceptic, had no right to have said more than _Cogito +ergo cogitationes sunt._ But substitute willing for thinking, convert +the formula into _Volo ergo sum_, and it becomes irrefragable. + +So far as I can perceive, it would have been sufficient for Mr. Green's +subsequent argument to have thus established the position of the will as +the ultimate fact of consciousness, but he goes on to assert that he has +thus secured the immovable ground of a philosophy of Realism. For since +man, "in affirming his Personality by the verb substantive I am, asserts, +nay, acquires, the knowledge of his own Substance as a Spiritual being, +and thereby knows what substance truly and properly is--so he +contemplates the outward, persons or things, as subjects partaking of +reality by virtue of the same substance of which he is conscious in his +own person." So far, however, from this being a philosophy of Realism, it +is in effect, if not indeed in actual terms, a philosophy of Idealism. I, +at least, am unable to see how any Idealist, from Berkeley downwards, +could ask for a better definition of his theory of the external world +than that it "partakes of reality by virtue of the same substance of +which he is conscious in his own person." + +But it is, of course, with the second volume of Mr. Green's work that one +is chiefly concerned. Had Coleridge been a mere Transcendentalist for +Transcendentalism's sake, had there been no connection between his +philosophy of Being and his religious creed, it might be a question +whether even the highly condensed and necessarily imperfect sketch which +has here been given of it would not have been superfluous and out of +place. But Coleridge was a Theosophist first, and a philosopher +afterwards; it was mainly as an organon of religion that he valued his +philosophy, and it was to the development and perfection of it, _as +such organon,_ that he may be said to have devoted, so far as it could +be redeemed from its enthralment to lower necessities, the whole of the +latter half of his career. No account of his life, therefore, could be +complete without at least some brief glance at the details of this +notable attempt to lead the world to true religion by the road of the +Transcendental philosophy. It is difficult, of course, for those who have +been trained in a wholly differet school of thought to do justice to +processes of reasoning carried on, as they cannot but hold, in terms of +the inconceivable; it is still more difficult to be sure that you have +done justice to it after all has been said; and I think that no candid +student of the Coleridgian philosophico-theology (not being a professed +disciple of it, and therefore bound, at any rate, to feign familiarity +with incomprehensibilities) will deny that he is often compelled, to +formulate its positions and recite its processes in somewhat of the same +modest and confiding spirit as animates those youthful geometricians who +leacn their Euclid by heart. With this proviso I will, as briefly as may +be, trace the course of the dialectic by which Mr. Green seeks to make +the Coleridgian metaphysics demonstrative of the truth of Christianity. + +Having shown that the Will is the true and the only tenable base of +Philosophic Realism, the writer next proceeds to explain the growth of +the Soul, from its rudimental strivings in its fallen condition to the +development of its spiritual capabilities and to trace its ascent to the +conception of the Idea of God. The argument--if we may apply so definite +a name to a process which is continually forced to appeal to something +that may perhaps be higher, but is certainly _other_ than the +ratiocinative faculty--is founded partly on moral and partly on +intellectual considerations. By an analysis of the moral phenomena +associated with the action of the human will, and, in particular, of the +conflict which arises between "the tendency of all Will to make itself +absolute," and the consciousness that, under the conditions of man's +fallen state, nothing but misery could result both to the individual and +the race from the fulfilment of this tendency,--Mr. Green shows how the +Soul, or the Reason, or the Speculative Intellect (for he seems to use +all three expressions indiscriminately) is morally prepared for the +reception of the truth which his Understanding alone could never have +compassed,--the Idea of God. This is in effect neither more nor less than +a restatement of that time-honoured argument for the existence of some +Being of perfect holiness which has always weighed so much with men of +high spirituality as to blind them to the fact of its actually enhancing +the intellectual difficulties of the situation. Man possesses a Will +which longs to fulfil itself; but it is coupled with a nature which +constantly impels him to those gratifications of will which tend not to +self-preservation and progress, but to their contraries. Surely, then, on +the strength of the mere law of life, which prevails everywhere, here +must be some higher archetypal Will, to which human wills, or rather +certain selected examples of them, may more and more conform themselves, +and in which the union of unlimited efficiency in operation with +unqualified purity of aim has been once for all effected. Or to put it +yet another way: The life of the virtuous man is a life auxiliary to the +preservation and progress of the race; but his will is under restraint. +The will of the vicious man energises freely enough, but his life is +hostile to the preservation and progress of the race. Now the natural and +essential _nisus_ of all Will is towards absolute freedom. But +nothing in life has a natural and essential _nisus_ towards that +which tends to its deterioration and extinction. Therefore, there must be +some ultimate means of reconciling absolute freedom of the Will with +perfectly salutary conditions of its exercise. And since Mr. Green, like +his master and all other Platonists, is incapable of stopping here, and +contenting himself with assuming the existence of a "stream of tendency" +which will gradually bring the human will into the required conditions, +he here makes the inevitable Platonic jump, and proceeds to conclude that +there must be a self-existent ideal Will in which absolute freedom and +power concur with perfect purity and holiness. + +So much for the moral part of Mr. Green's proof, which so far fails, it +will be observed, to carry us much beyond the Pantheistic position. It +has, that is to say, to be proved that the "power not ourselves," which +has been called Will, originates in some source to which we should be +rationally justified in giving the name of "God;" and, singular as such a +thing may seem, it is impossible at any rate for the logic of the +understanding to regard Mr. Green's argument on this point as otherwise +than hopelessly circular. The half-dozen pages or so which he devotes to +the refutation of the Pantheistic view reduce themselves to the following +simple _petitio principii:_ the power is first assumed to be a Will; +it is next affirmed with perfect truth that the very notion of Will would +escape us except under the condition of Personality; and from this the +existence of a personal God as the source of the power in question +deduced. And the same vice underlies the further argument by which Mr. +Green meets the familiar objection to the personality of the Absolute as +involving contradictory conceptions. An infinite Person, he argues, is no +contradiction in terms, unless "finition or limitation" be regarded as +identical with "negation" (which, when applied to a hypothetical +Infinite, one would surely think it is); and an Absolute Will is not the +less absolute from being self-determined _ab intra._ For how, he +asks, can any Will which is causative of reality be conceived as a Will +except by conceiving it as _se finiens,_ predetermining itself to +the specific processes required by the act of causation? How, indeed? But +the answer of a Pantheist would of course be that the very impossibility +of conceiving of Will except as _se finiens_ is his very ground for +rejecting the notion of a volitional (in the sense of a personal) origin +of the cosmos. + +However, it is beyond my purposes to enter into any detailed criticism of +Mr. Green's position, more especially as I have not yet reached the +central and capital point of his spiritual philosophy--the construction +of the Christian theology on the basis of the Coleridgian metaphysics. +Having deduced the Idea of God from man's consciousness of an individual +Will perpetually affirming itself, Mr. Green proceeds to evolve the Idea +of the Trinity, by (as he considers it) an equally necessary process from +two of the invariable accompaniments of the above-mentioned introspective +act. "For as in our consciousness," he truly says, "we are under the +necessity of distinguishing the relation of 'myself,' now as the +_subject_ thinking and now as the _object_ contemplated in the +manifold of thought, so we might express the relations in the Divine +instance as _Deus Subjectivus_ and _Deus Objectimis,_--that is, +the Absolute Subjectivity or Supreme Will, uttering itself as and +contemplating itself in the Absolute Objectivity or plenitude of Being +eternally and causatively realised in his Personality." Whence it follows +(so runs or seems to run the argument) that the Idea of God the Father as +necessarily involves the Idea of God the Son as the "I" who, as the +thinking subject, contemplate myself, implies the contemplated "Me" as +the object thought of. Again, the man who reflects on the fact of his +consciousness, "which discloses to him the unavoidable opposition of +subject and object in the self of which he is conscious, cannot fail to +see that the conscious mind requires not only the distinction in order to +the act of reflection in itself, but the continual sense of the relative +nature of the distinction and of the essential oneness of the mind +itself." Whence it follows (so runs or seems to run the argument) that +the Idea of the first two Persons of the Trinity as necessarily involves +the Idea of the Third Person, as the contemplation of the "Me" by the "I" +implies the perpetual consciousness that the contemplator and the +contemplated--the "I" and the "Me"--are one. In this manner is the Idea +of the Trinity shown to be involved in the Idea of God, and to arise out +of it by an implication as necessary as that which connects together the +three phases of consciousness attendant upon every self-contemplative act +of the individual mind. [1] + +It may readily be imagined that after the Speculative Reason has been +made to perform such feats as these the remainder of the work proposed to +it could present no serious difficulty. And in the half-dozen chapters +which follow it is made to evolve in succession the doctrine of the +Incarnation, the Advent, and the Atonement of Christ, and to explain the +mysteries of the fall of man and of original sin. Considered in the +aspect in which Coleridge himself would have preferred to regard his +pupil's work, namely as a systematic attempt to lead the minds of men to +Christianity by an intellectual route, no more hopeless enterprise +perhaps could have been conceived than that embodied in these volumes. It +is like offering a traveller a guide-book written in hieroglyphics. Upon +the most liberal computation it is probable that not one-fourth part of +educated mankind are capable of so much as comprehending the philosophic +doctrine upon which Coleridge seeks to base Christianity, and it is +doubtful whether any but a still smaller fraction of these would admit +that the foundation was capable of supporting the superstructure. That +the writings of the pupil, like the teachings of the master whom he +interprets, may serve the cause of religion in another than an +intellectual way is possible enough. Not a few of the functions assigned +to the Speculative Reason will strike many of us as moral and spiritual +rather than intellectual in their character, and the appeal to them is in +fact an appeal to man to chasten the lower passions of his nature, and to +discipline his unruly will. Exhortations of that kind are religious all +the world of philosophy over, and will succeed in proportion to the moral +fervour and oratorical power which distinguish them. But if the benefits +of Coleridge's theological teachings are to be reduced to this, it would +of course have been much better to have dissociated them altogether from +the exceedingly abstruse metaphysic to which they have been wedded. + + +FOOTNOTES + +1. Were it not hazardous to treat processes of the Speculative Reason +as we deal with the vulgar dialectic of the Understanding, one would be +disposed to reply that if the above argument proves the existence of +three persons in the Godhead, it must equally prove the existence of +three persons in every man who reflects upon his conscious self. That +the Divine Mind, when engaged in the act of self-contemplation, must be +conceived under three relations is doubtless as true as that the human +mind, when so engaged, must be so conceived; but that these three +relations are so many objective realities is what Mr. Green asserts +indeed a few pages farther on, but what he nowhere attempts to prove. + + + + +CHAPTER XII. + +Coleridge's position in his later years--His discourse--His influence +on contemporary thought--Final review of his intellectual work. + + +The critic who would endeavour to appreciate the position which +Coleridge fills in the history of literature and thought for the first +half of the nineteenth century must, if he possesses ordinary candour +and courage, begin, I think, with a confession. He must confess an +inability to comprehend the precise manner in which that position was +attained, and the precise grounds on which it was recognised. For vast +as were Coleridge's powers of thought and expression, and splendid, if +incomplete, as is the record which they have left behind them in his +works, they were never directed to purposes of instruction or +persuasion in anything like that systematic and concentrated manner +which is necessary to him who would found a school. Coleridge's +writings on philosophical and theological subjects were essentially +discursive, fragmentary, incomplete. Even when he professes an +intention of exhausting his subject and affects a logical arrangement, +it is not long before he forgets the design and departs from the order. +His disquisitions are in no sense connected treatises on the subjects +to which they relate. Brilliant _apercus,_ gnomic sayings, flights +of fervid eloquence, infinitely suggestive reflections--of these there +is enough and to spare; but these, though an ample equipment for the +critic, are not sufficient for the constructive philosopher. Nothing, +it must be frankly said, in Coleridge's philosophical and theological +writings--nothing, that is to say, which appeals in them to the mere +intelligence--suffices to explain, at least to the appreciation of +posterity, the fact that he was surrounded during these closing years +of his life by an eager crowd of real or supposed disciples, including +two, at any rate, of the most remarkable personalities of the time. And +if nothing in Coleridge's writings serves to account for it, so neither +does anything traceable or tangible in the mere matter of his +conversations. This last point, however, is one which must be for the +present reserved. I wish for the moment to confine myself to the fact +of Coleridge's position during his later life at Highgate. To this we +have, as we all know, an extremely eminent witness, and one from whose +evidence most people, one may suppose, are by this time able to make +their own deductions in all matters relating to the persons with whom +he was brought into contact. Carlyle on Charles Lamb, few as the sour +sentences are, must always warn us to be careful how we follow Carlyle +"on" anybody whomsoever. But there is no evidence of any ill feeling on +Carlyle's part towards Coleridge--nothing but a humorous, kindly- +contemptuous compassion for his weaknesses and eccentricities; and the +famous description in the _Life of Sterling_ may be taken +therefore as a fairly accurate account of the man and the circumstances +to which it refers:-- + +"Coleridge sat on the brow of Highgate Hill in those years, looking +down on London and its smoke tumult like a sage escaped from the +inanity of life's battle, attracting towards him the thoughts of +innumerable brave souls still engaged there. His express +contributions to poetry, philosophy, or any specific province of human +literature or enlightenment had been small and sadly intermittent; but +he had, especially among young inquiring men, a higher than literary, a +kind of prophetic or magician character. He was thought to hold--he +alone in England--the key of German and other Transcendentalisms; knew +the sublime secret of believing by the 'reason' what the +'understanding' had been obliged to fling out as incredible; and could +still, after Hume and Voltaire had done their best and worst with him, +profess himself an orthodox Christian, and say and print to the Church +of England, with its singular old rubrics and surplices at +Allhallowtide, _Esto perpetua._ A sublime man; who alone in those +dark days had saved his crown of spiritual manhood, escaping from the +black materialisms and revolutionary deluges with 'God, Freedom, +Immortality,' still his; a king of men. The practical intellects of the +world did not much heed him, or carelessly reckoned him a metaphysical +dreamer; but to the rising spirits of the young generation he had this +dusky sublime character, and sat there as a kind of Magus, girt in +mystery and enigma; his Dodona oak-grove (Mr. Gillman's house at +Highgate) whispering strange things, uncertain whether oracles or +jargon." + +The above quotation would suffice for my immediate purpose, +but it is impossible to deny oneself or one's readers the pleasure of a +refreshed recollection of the noble landscape-scene and the masterly +portrait that follow: + +"The Gillmans did not encourage much company or excitation of any sort +round their sage; nevertheless, access to him, if a youth did reverently +wish it, was not difficult. He would stroll about the pleasant garden +with you, sit in the pleasant rooms of the place--perhaps take you to +his own peculiar room, high up, with a rearward view, which was the +chief view of all. A really charming outlook in fine weather. Close at +hand wide sweeps of flowing leafy gardens, their few houses mostly +hidden, the very chimney-pots veiled under blossoming umbrage, flowed +gloriously down hill; gloriously issuing in wide-tufted undulating +plain country, rich in all charms of field and town. Waving blooming +country of the brightest green, dotted all over with handsome villas, +handsome groves crossed by roads and human traffic, here inaudible, or +heard only as a musical hum; and behind all swam, under olive-tinted +haze, the illimitable limitary ocean of London, with its domes and +steeples definite in the sun, big Paul's and the many memories attached +to it hanging high over all. Nowhere of its kind could you see a grander +prospect on a bright summer day, with the set of the air going southward +--southward, and so draping with the city smoke not _you_ but the +city." + +Then comes the invariable final touch, the one dash of black--or green, +shall we call it--without which the master left no picture that had a +human figure in the foreground:-- + +"Here for hours would Coleridge talk concerning all conceivable or +inconceivable things; and liked nothing better than to have an +intelligent, or, failing that, even a silent and patient human +listener. He distinguished himself to all that ever heard him as at +least the most surprising talker extant in this world,--and to some +small minority, by no means to all, as the most excellent." + +Then follows the well-known, wonderfully vivid, cynically pathetic, +sketch of the man:-- + +"The good man--he was now getting old, towards sixty perhaps, and +gave you the idea of a life that had been full of sufferings; a +life heavy-laden, half-vanquished, still swimming painfully in +seas of manifold physical and other bewilderment. Brow and +head were round and of massive weight, but the face was flabby and +irresolute. The deep eyes, of a light hazel, were as full of sorrow as +of inspiration; confused pain looked mildly from them, as in a kind of +mild astonishment. The whole figure and air, good and amiable +otherwise, might be called flabby and irresolute; expressive of +weakness under possibility of strength. He hung loosely on his limbs, +with knees bent, and stooping attitude; in walking he rather shuffled +than decisively stept; and a lady once remarked he never could fix +which side of the gardenwalk would suit him best, but continually +shifted, corkscrew fashion, and kept trying both; a heavy-laden, high- +aspiring, and surely much-suffering man. His voice, naturally soft and +good, had contracted itself into a plaintive snuffle and singsong; he +spoke as if preaching--you could have said preaching earnestly and +almost hopelessly the weightiest things. I still recollect his 'object' +and 'subject,' terms of continual recurrence in the Kantean province; +and how he sang and snuffled them into 'om-m-ject' and 'sum-m-mject,' +with a kind of solemn shake or quaver as he rolled along. [1] No talk +in his century or in any other could be more surprising." + +Such, as he appeared to this half-contemptuous, half-compassionate, +but ever acute observer, was Coleridge at this the zenith of his +influence over the nascent thought of his day. Such to Carlyle +seemed the _manner_ of the deliverance of the oracles; in his +view of their matter, as we all know from an equally well-remembered +passage, his tolerance disappears, and his account here, with all +its racy humour, is almost wholly impatient. Talk, "suffering no +interruption, however reverent," "hastily putting aside all foreign +additions, annotation, or most ingenuous desires for elucidation, as +well-meant superfluities which would never do;" talk "not flowing +anywhither, like a river, but spreading everywhither in inextricable +currents and regurgitations like a lake or sea;" a "confused +unintelligible flood of utterance, threatening to submerge all known +landmarks of thought and drown the world with you"--this, it must be +admitted, is not an easily recognisable description of the Word of +Life. Nor, certainly, does Carlyle's own personal experience of its +preaching and effects--he having heard the preacher talk "with eager +musical energy two stricken hours, his face radiant and moist, and +communicate no meaning whatsoever to any individual of his hearers," +--certain of whom, the narrator for one, "still kept eagerly +listening in hope, while the most had long before given up and formed +(if the room was large enough) humming groups of their own." "He +began anywhere," continues this irresistibly comic sketch; "you put +some question to him, made some suggestive observation; instead of +answering this, or decidedly setting out towards an answer of it, he +would accumulate formidable apparatus, logical swim-bladders, +transcendental life-preservers, and other precautionary and +vehiculatory gear for setting out; perhaps did at last get under way +--but was swiftly solicited, turned aside by the flame of some +radiant new game on this hand or on that into new courses, and ever +into new; and before long into all the universe, where it was +uncertain what game you would catch, or whether any." He +had, indeed, according to the dissatisfied listener, "not the least +talent for explaining this or anything to them; and you swam and +fluttered on the mistiest, wide, unintelligible deluge of things for +most part in a rather profitless uncomfortable manner." And the few +vivid phrases of eulogy which follow seem only to deepen by contrast +the prevailing hue of the picture. The "glorious islets" which were +sometimes seen to "rise out of the haze," the "balmy sunny islets of +the blest and the intelligible, at whose emergence the secondary +humming group would all cease humming and hang breathless upon the +eloquent words, till once your islet got wrapped in the mist again, and +they would recommence humming"--these, it seems to be suggested, but +rarely revealed themselves; but "eloquent, artistically expressive +words you always had; piercing radiances of a most subtle insight came +at intervals; tones of noble pious sympathy recognisable as pious +though strangely coloured, were never wanting long; but, in general, +you could not call this aimless cloud-capt, cloud-bound, lawlessly +meandering discourse, by the name of excellent talk, but only of +surprising.... The moaning sing-song of that theosophico-metaphysical +monotony left in you at last a very dreary feeling." + +It is tolerably clear, I think, that some considerable discount must +be allowed upon the sum of disparagement in this famous criticism. We have +learnt, indeed, to be more on the look-out for the disturbing influences +of temperament in the judgments of this atrabilious observer than was the +case when the _Life of Sterling_ was written, and it is difficult +to doubt that the unfavourable strokes in the above-quoted description +have been unduly multiplied and deepened, partly in the mere +waywardness of a sarcastic humour, and partly perhaps from a less +excusable cause. It is always dangerous to accept one remarkable +talker's view of the characteristics of another; and if this is true of +men who merely compete with each other in the ordinary give-and-take of +the dinner-table epigrammatist and _raconteur,_ the caution is +doubly necessary in the case of two rival prophets--two competing +oracles. There are those among us who hold that the conversation of the +Chelsea sage, in his later years, resembled his own description of the +Highgate philosopher's, in this, at any rate, that it was mightily +intolerant of interruption; and one is apt to suspect that at no time +of his life did Carlyle "understand duologue" much better than +Coleridge. It is probable enough, therefore, that the young lay- +preacher did not quite relish being silenced by the elder, and that his +account of the sermons was coloured by the recollection that his own +remained undelivered. There is an abundance of evidence that the +"glorious islets" emerged far more often from the transcendental haze +than Carlyle would have us suppose. Hazlitt, a bitter assailant of +Coleridge's, and whose caustic remark that "his talk was excellent if +you let him start from no premisses and come to no conclusion" is cited +with approval by Carlyle, has elsewhere spoken of Coleridge as the only +person from whom he ever learned anything, has said of him that though +he talked on for ever you wished him to talk on for ever, that "his +thoughts did not seem to come with labour and effort, but as if borne +on the gusts of genius, and as if the wings of his imagination lifted +him from his feet." And besides this testimony to the eloquence which +Carlyle only but inadequately recognises, one should set for what it is +worth De Quincey's evidence to that consequence of thought which +Carlyle denies altogether. To De Quincey the complaint that Coleridge +wandered in his talk appeared unjust. According to him the great +discourser only "seemed to wander," and he seemed to wander the most +"when in fact his resistance to the wandering instinct was greatest, +viz. when the compass and huge circuit by which his illustrations moved +travelled farthest into remote regions before they began to revolve. +Long before this coming round commenced most people had lost him, and, +naturally enough, supposed that he had lost himself. They continued to +admire the separate beauty of the thoughts, but did not see their +relations to the dominant theme." De Quincey however, declares +positively in the faith of his "long and intimate knowledge of +Coleridge's mind, that logic the most severe was as inalienable from +his modes of thinking as grammar from his language." + +Nor should we omit the testimony of another, a more partial, perhaps, +but even better informed judge. The _Table Talk_, edited by Mr. +Nelson Coleridge, shows how pregnant, how pithy, how full of subtle +observation, and often also of playful humour, could be the talk of +the great discourser in its lighter and more colloquial forms. The +book indeed is, to the thinking of one, at any rate, of its frequent +readers, among the most delightful in the world. But thus speaks its +editor of his uncle's conversation in his more serious moods:-- + +"To pass an entire day with Coleridge was a marvellous change indeed +[from the talk of daily life]. It was a Sabbath past expression, deep +and tranquil and serene. You came to a man who had travelled in many +countries and in critical times; who had seen and felt the world in +most of its ranks and in many of its vicissitudes and weaknesses; one +to whom all literature and art were absolutely subject; and to whom, +with a reasonable allowance as to technical details, all science was, +in a most extraordinary degree, familiar. Throughout a long-drawn +summer's day would this man talk to you in low, equable, but clear +and musical tones concerning things Iranian and divine; marshalling +all history, harmonising all experiment, probing the depths of your +consciousness, and revealing visions of glory and terror to the +imagination; but pouring withal such floods of light upon the mind +that you might for a season, like Paul, become blind in the very act +of conversion. And this he would do without so much as one allusion +to himself, without a word of reflection upon others, save when any +given art fell naturally in the way of his discourse; without one +anecdote that was not proof and illustration of a previous position; +--gratifying no passion, indulging no caprice, but, with a calm +mastery over your soul, leading you onward and onward for ever +through a thousand windings, yet with no pause, to some magnificent +point in which, as in a focus, all the parti-coloured rays of his +discourse should converge in light. In all these he was, in truth, +your teacher and guide; but in a little while you might forget that +he was other than a fellow-student and the companion of your way-- +so playful was his manner, so simple his language, so affectionate the +glance of his eye!" + +Impressive, however, as these displays may have been, it is impossible +to suppose that their direct didactic value as discourses was at +all considerable. Such as it was, moreover, it was confined in all +probability to an extremely select circle of followers. A few +mystics of the type of Maurice, a few eager seekers after truth +like Sterling, may have gathered, or fancied they gathered, distinct +dogmatic instruction from the Highgate oracles; and no doubt, to the +extent of his influence over the former of these disciples, we may +justly credit Coleridge's discourses with having exercised a real if +only a transitory directive effect upon nineteenth-century thought. But +the terms in which his influence is sometimes spoken of appear, as far +as one can judge of the matter at this distance of time, to be greatly +exaggerated. To speak of it in the same way as we are--or were-- +accustomed to speak of the influence of Carlyle, is to subject it to an +altogether inappropriate comparison. It is not merely that Coleridge +founded no recognisable school, for neither did Carlyle. It is that the +former can show absolutely nothing at all resembling that sort of power +which enabled the latter to lay hold upon all the youthful minds of his +time--minds of the most disparate orders and associated with the utmost +diversities of temperament, and detain them in a captivity which, brief +as it may have been in some cases, has in no case failed to leave its +marks behind it. Over a few spirits already prepared to receive them +Coleridge's teachings no doubt exerted power, but he led no soul +captive against its will. There are few middle-aged men of active +intelligence at the present day who can avoid a confession of having +"taken" Carlylism in their youth; but no mental constitutions not +predisposed to it could ever have caught Coleridgism at all. There is +indeed no moral theory of life, there are no maxims of conduct, such as +youth above all things craves for, in Coleridge's teaching. Apart from +the intrinsic difficulties of the task to which he invites his +disciples, it labours under a primary and essential disadvantage of +postponing moral to intellectual liberation. Contrive somehow or other +to attain to just ideas as to the capacities and limitations of the +human consciousness, considered especially in relation to its two +important and eternally distinct functions, the Reason and the +Understanding: and peace of mind shall in due time be added unto you. +That is in effect Coleridge's answer to the inquirer who consults him; +and if the distinction between the Reason and the Understanding were as +obvious as it is obscure to the average unmetaphysical mind, and of a +value as assured for the purpose to which Coleridge applies it as it is +uncertain, the answer would nevertheless send many a would-be disciple +sorrowful away. His natural impulse is to urge the oracle to tell him +whether there be not some one moral attitude which he can wisely and +worthily adopt towards the universe, whatever theory he may form of his +mental relations to it, or without forming any such theory at all. And +it was because Carlyle supplied, or was believed to supply an answer, +such as it was, to this universal question, that his train of +followers, voluntary and involuntary, permanent and temporary, has been +so large. + +It appears to me, therefore, on as careful an examination of +the point as the data admit of, that Coleridge's position in these +latter days of his life has been somewhat mythically exalted by the +generation which succeeded him. There are, I think, distinct traces of +a Coleridgian legend which has only slowly died out. The actual truth I +believe to be that Coleridge's position from 1818 or 1820 till his +death, though one of the greatest eminence, was in no sense one of the +highest, or even of any considerable influence. Fame and honour, in the +fullest measure, were no doubt his: in that matter, indeed, he was only +receiving payment of long-delayed arrears. The poetic school with which +he was, though not with entire accuracy, associated had outlived its +period of contempt and obloquy. In spite of the two quarterlies, the +Tory review hostile, its Whig rival coldly silent, the public had +recognised the high imaginative merit of _Christabel;_ and who +knows but that if the first edition of the _Lyrical Ballads_ had +appeared at this date instead of twenty years before, it would have +obtained a certain number of readers even among landsmen? [2] But over +and above the published works of the poet there were those +extraordinary personal characteristics to which the fame of his works +of course attracted a far larger share than formerly of popular +attention. A remarkable man has more attractive power over the mass of +mankind than the most remarkable of books, and it was because the +report of Coleridge among those who knew him was more stimulating to +public curiosity than even the greatest of his poems, that his +celebrity in these latter years attained such proportions. Wordsworth +said that though "he had seen many men do wonderful things, Coleridge +was the only wonderful man he had ever met," and it was not the doer of +wonderful things but the wonderful man that English society in those +days went out for to see. Seeing would have been enough, but for a +certain number there was hearing too, with the report of it for all; +and it is not surprising that fame of the marvellous discourser should, +in mere virtue of his extraordinary power of improvised speech, his +limitless and untiring mastery of articulate words, have risen to a +height to which writers whose only voice is in their pens can never +hope to attain. + +A reputation of that kind, however, must necessarily perish with its +possessor; and Coleridge's posthumous renown has grown, his place in +English literature has become more assured, if it has not been even +fixed higher, since his death than during his lifetime. This +is, in part no doubt, one among the consequences of those very defects +of character which so unfortunately limited his actual achievements. He +has been credited by faith, as it were, with those famous "unwritten +books" of which he assured Charles Lamb that the titles alone would +fill a volume, and such "popular reputation," in the strict sense of +the word, as he has left behind him, is measured rather by what he was +thought capable of doing than by what he did. By serious students, +however, the real worth of Coleridge will be differently estimated. For +them his peculiar value to English literature is not only undiminished +by the incompleteness of his work; it has been, in a certain sense, +enhanced thereby. Or, perhaps, it would be more strictly accurate to +say that the value could not have existed without the incompleteness. A +Coleridge with the faculty of concentration, and the habit of method +superadded--a Coleridge capable of becoming possessed by any one form +of intellectual energy to the exclusion of all others--might, indeed, +have left behind him a more enduring reputation as a philosopher, and +possibly (although this, for reasons already stated, is, in my own +opinion, extremely doubtful) bequeathed to his countrymen more poetry +destined to live; but, unquestionably, he would never have been able to +render that precise service to modern thought and literature which, in +fact, they owe to him. To have exercised his vivifying and fertilising +influence over the minds of others his intellect was bound to be of the +dispersive order; it was essential that he should "take all knowledge +to be his province," and that that eager, subtle, and penetrative mind +should range as freely as it did over subject after subject of human +interest;--illuminating each of them in turn with those rays of true +critical insight which, amid many bewildering cross-lights and some few +downright _ignes fatui,_ flash forth upon us from all Coleridge's +work. + +Of the personal weaknesses which prevented the just development +of the powers, enough, perhaps, has been incidentally said in the +course of this volume. But, in summing up his history, I shall not, I +trust, be thought to judge the man too harshly in saying that, though +the natural disadvantages of wretched health, almost from boyhood +upward, must, in common fairness, be admitted in partial excuse for his +failure, they do not excuse it altogether. It is difficult not to feel +that Coleridge's character, apart altogether from defects of physical +constitution, was wanting in manliness of fibre. His willingness to +accept assistance at the hands of others is too manifestly displayed +even at the earlier and more robust period of his life. It would be a +mistake, of course, in dealing with a literary man of Coleridge's era, +to apply the same standards as obtain in our own days. Wordsworth, as +we have seen, made no scruple to accept the benevolences of the +Wedgwoods. Southey, the type of independence and self-help, was, for +some years, in receipt of a pension from a private source. But +Coleridge, as Miss Meteyard's disclosures have shown, was at all times +far more willing to depend upon others, and was far less scrupulous +about soliciting their bounty, than was either of his two friends. Had +he shared more of the spirit which made Johnson refuse to owe to the +benevolence of others what Providence had enabled him to do for +himself, it might have been better, no doubt, for the world and for the +work which he did therein. + +But when we consider what that work was, how varied and how wonderful, +it seems idle--nay, it seems ungrateful and ungracious--to speculate +too curiously on what further or other benefits this great intellect +might have conferred upon mankind, had its possessor been endowed with +those qualities of resolution and independence which he lacked. That +Coleridge so often only _shows_ the way, and so seldom guides our +steps along it to the end, is no just ground of complaint. It would be +as unreasonable to complain of a beacon-light that it is not a steam-tug, +and forget in the incompleteness of its separate services the glory of +their number. It is a more reasonable objection that the light itself +is too often liable to obscuration,--that it stands erected upon a rock +too often enshrouded by the mists of its encircling sea. But even this +objection should not too greatly weigh with us. It would be wiser and +better for us to dwell rather upon its splendour and helpfulness in the +hours of its efficacy, to think how vast is then the expanse of waters +which it illuminates, and its radiance how steady and serene. + + +FOOTNOTES + +1. No one who recollects the equally singular manner in which another +most distinguished metaphysician--the late Dean Hansel--was wont to +quaver forth his admirably turned and often highly eloquent phrases of +philosophical exposition, can fail to be reminded of him by the above +description. No two temperaments or histories however could be more +dissimilar. The two philosophers resembled each other in nothing save +the "om-mject" and "sum-mject" of their studies. + +2. The Longmans told Coleridge that the greater part of the first +edition of the Lyrical Ballads had been sold to seafaring men, who, +having heard of the _Ancient Mariner_, took the volume for a naval +song-book. + + + +INDEX + + +Adams, Dr., + +_Aeolian Harp,_ + circumstances under which it was written, + Coleridge's opinion of, + +_Aids to Reflection,_ its popularity, + its value as a spiritual manual, + its inferiority from a literary point of view, + +Allan Bank, + +Allsop, Mr. Thomas, + +_Ancient Mariner,_ + how and when first conceived, + its uniqueness, + Wordsworth's account of its origin + and of his suggestions, + a sublime "pot-boiler," + realistic force of its narrative, + its vividness of imagery, + its wonderful word-pictures, + its evenness of execution, + examples of its consummate art, + its chief characteristics, + +Anecdotes, + +Ball, Sir Alexander, + +Beaumont, Lady, + +Berkeley, + +_Biographia Literaria,_ + its interest, critical and illustrative, + its main value, + its analysis of the principles of poetry, + its examination of Wordsworth's theory, + its contents, + +_Blackwood's Magazine,_ + Coleridge's contributions to, + +Bonaparte, + +_Borderers_ (Wordsworth's), + +Bowles, William Lisle, + +Burke, + sonnet to, + +Byron, + +Calne, Coleridge at, + +_Cambridge Intelligencer _(Flower's), + +Carlyle, description of Coleridge by, + +Carrlyon, Dr., + reminiscences of Coleridge in Germany by, + +_Christabel,_ + Coleridge's opinion of, + its unfinished condition, + the lines on the "spell," + its high place as a work of creative art, + its fragmentary beauties, + the description of Christabel's chamber, + its main idea, + outline of the unfinished parts, + Lamb and Hartley Coleridge on, + its perfection from the metrical point of view, + publication of the second part, + its popularity, + Coleridge's great desire to complete it, + +_Circassian Love Chant_, + its charm of melody, + +Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. + His biographers, + birth and family history, + his boyhood and school days, + early childhood, + death of his father, + goes to Christ's Hospital, + goes to Jesus College, Cambridge, + wins the Browne Gold Medal, + leaves Cambridge suddenly and enlists in the army, + his discharge, + returns to Cambridge, + his meeting with Southey and Sara Fricker (his future wife), + writes the _Fall of Robespierre_ with Southey, + leaves Cambridge, + delivers the Bristol lectures, + marries Sara Fricker at Bristol, + writes the _Aeolian Harp_, + plunges into politics and journalism, + projects the _Watchman_ and goes on a canvassing tour, + preaches Unitarian sermons by the way, + brings out the _Watchman_, + retires to a cottage in Somersetshire with Charles Lloyd, + his meeting with Wordsworth, + cooling of his revolutionary enthusiasm, + his intercourse with Wordsworth, + writes _Osorio_, + his rambles with Wordsworth among the Quantock Hills, + projects the _Lyrical Ballads_, + writes the _Ancient Mariner_, + _Christabel_, + _Love_, + _Kubla Khan_, + undertakes the duties of a Unitarian preacher at Shrewsbury, + accepts an annuity from the two Wedgwoods, + goes to Germany with the Wordsworths, + returns to England after a year's absence, + translates Schiller's _Wallenstein_, + devotes himself again to journalism, + goes to the Lake country, + takes opium as an anodyne, + writes the _Ode to Dejection_, + goes on a tour with Thomas Wedgwood, + visits the Wordsworths at Grasmere, + his illness there, + goes to Malta, + ill effects of his stay there, + becomes Secretary to the Governor of the island, + goes to Italy, + returns to England after two and a half years' absence, + his wretched condition of mind and body, + estrangement from his wife, + domestic unhappiness, + meeting with De Quincey, + pecuniary embarrassments, + his lectures at the Royal Institution, + lives with Wordsworth at Allan Bank, + founds and edits the _Friend_, + delivers lectures on Shakespeare, + returns to journalism, + his necessities, + loses his annuity, + neglect of his family, + successful production of his play _Remorse_, + lectures again at Bristol, + retires to Calne with Mr. Morgan, + more financial troubles, + lives with Dr. Gillman at Highgate, + undergoes medical treatment for the opium habit, + returning health and vigour, + renewed literary activity, + writes the _Biographia Literaria_, + lectures again in London, + more money troubles, + publishes _Aids to Reflection_, + accompanies Wordsworth on a tour up the Rhine, + his declining years, + contemplation of his approaching end, + his death, + +Poet and Thinker. + His early bent towards poetry and metaphysics, + his prose style, + his early poems, their merits and defects, + his sonnets, + Coleridge at his best, + untimely decline of his poetic impulse, + Wordsworth's great influence on him, + Coleridge's mastery of the true ballad manner, + estimate of his poetic work, + comparison with Byron and Wordsworth, + his wonderful power of melody, + his great projects, + his critical powers, + his criticism of Shakespeare, + his philosophy, + his contemplated "Great Work," + his materials for various poems, + his metaphysics and theology, + his discourses, + exaggerated notions of his position and influence, + his "unwritten books," + + Precocious boyhood, + descriptions of him at various times, + his voice, + his conduct as a husband, + religious nature, + revolutionary enthusiasm, + consciousness of his great powers, + generous admiration for the gifts of others, + his womanly softness, + his pride in his personal appearance, + his contempt for money, + his ill-health, + his opium-eating, + his restlessness, + best portrait of him, + his unbusinesslike nature, + sorrows of his life, + his laudanum excesses, + his talk, + his weaknesses, + +Coleridge, Mrs., + +Coleridge, Rev. Derwent, + +Coleridge, Rev. George, + +Coleridge, Hartley, + +Coleridge, Rev. John, + +Coleridge, Luke, + +Coleridge, Nelson, + +Coleridge, Sarah, + +_Coleridge and Opium Eating_ (De Quincey's), + +_Condones ad Populum _(Bristol Lectures), + their warmth of language, + evidence of deep thought and reasoning in, + their crudeness, + +Consulate, Coleridge on the French, + +Cottle, Joseph, + +_Courier, The,_ + +_Dark Ladie,_ + +_Dejection, Ode to,_ + Coleridge's swan song, + its promise, + Coleridge's spiritual and moral losses bewailed in, + stanzas from, + biographical value of, + +De Quincey, + +Descartes, + +_Descriptive Sketches _(Wordsworth's), + +_Devil's Thoughts,_ + +_Early Years and Late Reflections_ (Dr. Carrlyon's), + +_Effusions,_ + +Erasmus, + +_Essays on his own Times,_ + +_Eve of St Agnes_ (Keats's), + +_Excursion_ (Wordsworth's), + +_Fall of Robespierre_, + +_Fears in Solitude_, + +_Fire, Famine and Slaughter_, + +Fox, Letters to, + +France, Coleridge on, + ode to, + +Fricker, Edith, + Mary, + Sara, + +_Friend, The_, + Coleridge's object in starting it, + its short-lived career, + causes of its failure, + compared with the _Spectator_, + +_Frost at Midnight_ (lines), + +Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, + Ode to, + +Germany, Coleridge and Wordsworth in, + +Gibbon, + +Gillman, Mr., + +Green, Mr. J. H., + +Grenville, Lord, + +Greta Hall, description of, + +_Group of Englishmen_ (Miss Meteyard's), + +Harz Mountains, Coleridge's tour through the, + +Hazlitt, + +Hume, + +_Joan of Arc_ (Southey's), Coleridge's contribution to, + +Johnson, Samuel, + +_Juvenile Poems_, + +Kean, + +Keats, Coleridge's meeting with and description of, + +Keswick, + +_Kosciusko_ (Sonnet), + +_Kubla Khan_, 39; a wild dream-poem, + its curious origin, + when written, + +_Lake Poets_ (De Quincey's), + +Lamb, Charles, + +Lamb, Mary, + +_Lay Sermons_, + +"Lear,": Coleridge on, + +Lectures, Coleridge's, + at Bristol, + at the Royal Institution, + on Shakespeare and Milton, + at Flower de Luce Court, + extempore lecture, + +Le Grice, Charles, + +_Liberal, The_, + +_Lines on ascending the Bracken_, + +_Lines to William Wordsworth_, + +_Literary Remains_, + +Lloyd, Charles, + +Locke, + +_Love_, + fascination of melody in, + +Lovell, Robert, + +_Lover's Resolution_, + +Luther, + +_Lyrical Ballads_, + origin of, + Coleridge's contributions to, + appearance of, + anecdote concerning, + +Malta, Coleridge's stay at, + +Maurice, + +Metaphysics and theology; Coleridge's, + +Meteyard, Miss, + +Milton, lectures on Shakespeare and, + +_Monody on the Death of Chatterton_, + +Montagu, Mr. and Mrs., + +Morgan, Mr. John, + +_Morning Post, The_, Coleridge's connection with, + +Nether Stowey, Coleridge at, + +_New Monthly Magazine_, + +_Nightingale_, + +_Omniana_ (Southey's), Coleridge's contribution to, + +Opium, + Coleridge's resort to, + origin of the habit, + De Quincey on, + + +_Pains of Sleep_, + +"Pantisocraey," + +Parry, Coleridge's fellow-student in Germany, + +_Peau de Chagrin_ (Balzac's), + +Philosophy, Coleridge's, + (see _Spiritual Philosophy_) + +_Pilgrimage_ (Purchas's), + +Pitt, + sonnet to, + +Pius VII., Pope, + +_Poems on Various Subjects_, + +_Poetical and Dramatic Works_, + +Poetry and the Fine Arts, Coleridge's lectures on, + +"Polonius," Coleridge's estimate of the character of, + +Poole, Mr. Thomas, + +_Prometheus_, Coleridge's paper on, + +Quantock Hills, Coleridge and Wordsworth among the, + +_Recantation_, + +_Recollections_ (Cottle's), + +_Recollections of a Literary Life_ (Miss Mitford's) + +_Reflections on having left a Place of Retirement_, + +_Religious Musings_, + +_Remorse_, + +Revolution, the French, + +_Robbers_, + +Rome, Coleridge in, + +Rousseau, + +Royal Institution, Coleridge's lectures at the, + +Schiller, + +Schlegel, + +Scott, Sir Walter, + +_Sermons, Lay_, + +Shakespeare, + lectures on, + criticisms on, + +Shakespearianism, German, + +Shelley, + +Sheridan, + +Shrewsbury, Coleridge's preaching in, + +_Sibylline Leaves_, + +Slave Trade, Coleridge's Greek Ode on the, + +_Songs of the Pixies_, + +_Sonnets on Eminent Characters_, + +Sotheby, Mr., + +Southey, + +Southey, Cuthbert, + +Southey, Edith, + +_Spectator_, + +_Spiritual Philosophy_ (Green's), + an exposition of Coleridge's Philosophy, + Coleridge's great fundamental principle, + the reason and the understanding, + will, not thought, the ultimate fact of self-consciousness, + a philosophy of Realism, + philosophy valued by Coleridge mainly as an organon of religion, + growth of the soul, + the idea of God, + idea of the Trinity, + "a guidebook written in hieroglyphics," + +_Statesman's Manual_, + +_Sterling, Life of_ (Carlyle's), + +Sterne, + +Stuart, Mr. Daniel, + +Swinburne's praise of Coleridge's lyrics, + +_Table Talk_, + +Theology and metaphysics, Coleridge's system of, + +Unitarian, Coleridge as a, + +_Visionary Hope_, + +Voltaire, + +_Voyages_ (Shelvocke's), + +_Wallenstein_, Coleridge's translation of, + +Warburton, + +_Watchman_, + +Wedgwood, Josiah, + +Wedgwood, Thomas, + +Wordsworth, + +Wordsworth, Dorothy, + +_Year, Ode to the Departing_, + +_Zapolya_, + + +THE END. + + + + + +End of Project Gutenberg's English Men of Letters: Coleridge, by H. 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Weyant, Charles Franks, +and the Distributed Proofreading Team. + + + + + + +</pre> + + +<h1>English Men of Letters:</h1> +<h1>Coleridge</h1> + +<p style="text-align: center;">by</p> + +<h3>H. D. Traill</h3> + + +<h2>Prefatory Note.</h2> + +<p>In a tolerably well-known passage in one of his essays De Quincey +enumerates the multiform attainments and powers of Coleridge, and the +corresponding varieties of demand made by them on any one who should +aspire to become this many-sided man's biographer. The description is +slightly touched with the humorous hyperbole characteristic of its +author; but it is in substance just, and I cannot but wish that it were +possible, within the limits of a preface, to set out the whole of it in +excuse for the many inevitable shortcomings of this volume. Having thus +made an "exhibit" of it, there would only remain to add that the +difficulties with which De Quincey confronts an intending biographer of +Coleridge must necessarily be multiplied many-fold by the conditions +under which this work is here attempted. No complete biography of +Coleridge, at least on any important scale of dimensions, is in +existence; no critical appreciation of his work <i>as a whole</i>, and +as correlated with the circumstances and affected by the changes of his +life, has, so far as I am aware, been attempted. To perform either of +these two tasks adequately, or even with any approach to adequacy, a +writer should at least have the elbow-room of a portly volume. To +attempt the two together, therefore, and to attempt them within the +limits prescribed to the manuals of this series, is an enterprise +which I think should claim, from all at least who are not offended by +its audacity, an almost unbounded indulgence.</p> + +<p>The supply of material for a <i>Life</i> of Coleridge is fairly plentiful, +though it is not very easily come by. For the most part it needs to be +hunted up or fished up – those accustomed to the work will appreciate +the difference between the two processes – from a considerable variety +of contemporary documents. Completed biography of the poet-philosopher +there is none, as has been said, in existence; and the one volume of +the unfinished <i>Life</i> left us by Mr. Gillman – a name never to be +mentioned with disrespect, however difficult it may sometimes be to +avoid doing so, by any one who honours the name and genius of +Coleridge – covers, and that in but a loose and rambling fashion, no +more than a few years. Mr. Cottle's <i>Recollections of Southey, +Wordsworth, and Coleridge</i> contains some valuable information on +certain points of importance, as also does the <i>Letters, Conversations, +etc., of S. T. C.</i> by Mr. Allsop. Miss Meteyard's <i>Group of Eminent +Englishmen</i> throws much light on the relations between Coleridge and +his early patrons the Wedgwoods. Everything, whether critical or +biographical, that De Quincey wrote on Coleridgian matters requires, +with whatever discount, to be carefully studied. <i>The Life of Wordsworth,</i> +by the Bishop of St. Andrews; <i>The Correspondence of Southey;</i> +the Rev. Derwent Coleridge's brief account of his father's life and +writings; and the prefatory memoir prefixed to the 1880 edition of +Coleridge's <i>Poetical and Dramatic Works</i>, have all had to be +consulted. But, after all, there remain several tantalising gaps in +Coleridge's life which refuse to be bridged over; and one cannot but +think that there must be enough unpublished matter in the possession +of his relatives and the representatives of his friends and +correspondents to enable some at least, though doubtless not all, of +these missing links to be supplied. Perhaps upon a fitting occasion +and for an adequate purpose these materials would be forthcoming.</p> + + + +<h1>Contents.</h1> + +<h2><b>Poetical Period.</b></h2> + +<h3><a href="#chap1">Chapter I.</a><br /> +1772-1794.</h3> +<blockquote>Birth, parentage, and early years – Christ's Hospital – Jesus College, +Cambridge.</blockquote> + +<h3><a href="#chap2">Chapter II.</a><br /> +1794-1797.</h3> +<blockquote>The Bristol Lectures – Marriage – Life at Clevedon – The <i>Watchman</i> – Retirement to Stowey – Introduction to Wordsworth.</blockquote> + +<h3><a href="#chap3">Chapter III.</a><br /> +1797-1799.</h3> +<blockquote>Coleridge and Wordsworth – Publication of the <i>Lyrical Ballads</i> – The +<i>Ancient Mariner</i> – The first part of <i>Christabel</i> – Decline of +Coleridge's poetic impulse – Final review of his poetry.</blockquote> + +<h2><b>Critical Period.</b></h2> + +<h3><a href="#chap4">Chapter IV.</a><br /> +1799-1800.</h3> +<blockquote>Visit to Germany – Life at Göttingen – Return – Explores the Lake country – London – The <i>Morning Post</i> – Coleridge as a journalist – Retirement to +Keswick.</blockquote> + +<h3><a href="#chap5">Chapter V.</a><br /> +1800-1804.</h3> +<blockquote>Life at Keswick – Second part of <i>Christabel</i> – Failing health – Resort +to opium – The <i>Ode to Dejection</i> – Increasing restlessness – Visit to +Malta.</blockquote> + +<h3><a href="#chap6">Chapter VI.</a><br /> +1806-1809.</h3> +<blockquote>Stay at Malta – Its injurious effects – Return to England – Meeting with De +Quincey – Residence in London – First series of lectures.</blockquote> + +<h3><a href="#chap7">Chapter VII.</a><br /> +1809-1810.</h3> +<blockquote>Return to the Lakes – From Keswick to Grasmere – With Wordsworth at Allan +Bank – The <i>Friend</i> – Quits the Lake country for ever.</blockquote> + +<h3><a href="#chap8">Chapter VIII.</a><br /> +1810-1816.</h3> +<blockquote>London again – Second recourse to journalism – The <i>Courier</i> articles – The Shakespeare lectures – Production of <i>Remorse</i> – At Bristol again +as lecturer – Residence at Calne – Increasing ill health and embarrassments + – Retirement to Mr. Gillman's.</blockquote> + +<h2><b>Metaphysical and Theological Period.</b></h2> + +<h3><a href="#chap9">Chapter IX.</a><br /> +1816-1818.</h3> +<blockquote>Life at Highgate – Renewed activity – Publications and republications – The +<i>Biographia Literaria</i> – The lectures of 1818 – Coleridge as a +Shakespearian critic.</blockquote> + +<h3><a href="#chap10">Chapter X.</a><br /> +1818-1834.</h3> +<blockquote>Closing years – Temporary renewal of money troubles – The <i>Aids to +Refection</i> – Growing weakness-Visit to Germany with the Wordsworths – Last illness and death.</blockquote> + +<h3><a href="#chap11">Chapter XI.</a></h3> +<blockquote>Coleridge's metaphysics and theology – <i>The Spiritual Philosophy</i> +of Mr. Green.</blockquote> + +<h3><a href="#12">Chapter XII.</a></h3> +<blockquote>Coleridge's position in his later years – His discourse – His +influence on contemporary thought – Final review of his intellectual +work.</blockquote> + +<h3><b><a href="#index">Index.</a></b></h3> + + + +<h1 style="text-align: center; font-variant: small-caps">Coleridge.</h1> + + + +<a name="chap1"></a> +<h2>Chapter I</h2> + +<blockquote>Birth, parentage, and early years – Christ's Hospital – Jesus College, +Cambridge. </blockquote> + +<p style="text-align: center">[1772-1794.]</p> + +<p>On the 21st of October 1772 there was added to that roll of famous +Englishmen of whom Devonshire boasts the parentage a new and not its +least illustrious name. <span style="font-variant: small-caps">Samuel Taylor Coleridge</span> was the son of the Rev. +John Coleridge, vicar of Ottery St. Mary in that county, and head +master of Henry VIII.'s Free Grammar School in the same town. He was +the youngest child of a large family. To the vicar, who had been twice +married, his first wife had borne three children, and his second ten. +Of these latter, however, one son died in infancy; four others, +together with the only daughter of the family, passed away before +Samuel had attained his majority; and thus only three of his brothers, +James, Edward, and George Coleridge, outlived the eighteenth century. +The first of these three survivors became the father of Henry Nelson +Coleridge – who married his cousin Sara, the poet's accomplished +daughter, and edited his uncle's posthumous works – and of the late Mr. +Justice Coleridge, himself the father of the present Lord Chief-Justice +of England. Edward, the second of the three, went, like his eldest +brother William, to Pembroke College, Oxford, and like him took orders; +and George, also educated at the same college and for the same +profession, succeeded eventually to his father's benefice and school. +The vicar himself appears from all accounts to have been a man of more +mark than most rural incumbents, and probably than a good many +schoolmasters of his day. He was a Hebrew scholar of some eminence, and +the compiler of a Latin grammar, in which, among other innovations +designed to simplify the study of the language for "boys just +initiated," he proposed to substitute for the name of "ablative" that +of "quale-quare-quidditive case." The mixture of amiable simplicity and +not unamiable pedantry to which this stroke of nomenclature testifies +was further illustrated in his practice of diversifying his sermons to +his village flock with Hebrew quotations, which he always commended to +their attention as "the immediate language of the Holy Ghost" – a +practice which exposed his successor, himself a learned man, to the +complaint of his rustic parishioners, that for all his erudition no +"immediate language of the Holy Ghost" was ever to be heard from +<i>him</i>. On the whole the Rev. John Coleridge appears to have been a +gentle and kindly eccentric, whose combination of qualities may have +well entitled him to be compared, as his famous son was wont in after-life to compare him, to Parson Adams.</p> + +<p>Of the poet's mother we know little; but it is to be gathered from such +information as has come to us through Mr. Gillman from Coleridge +himself that, though reputed to have been a "woman of strong mind," she +exercised less influence on the formation of her son's mind and +character than has frequently been the case with the not remarkable +mothers of remarkable men. "She was," says Mr. Gillman, "an uneducated +woman, industriously attentive to her household duties, and devoted to +the care of her husband and family. Possessing none even of the most +common accomplishments of her day, she had neither love nor sympathy +for the display of them in others. She disliked, as she would say, your +'harpsichord ladies,' and strongly tried to impress upon her sons their +little value" (that is, of the accomplishments) "in their choice of +wives." And the final judgment upon her is that she was "a very good +woman, though, like Martha, over careful in many things; very ambitious +for the advancement of her sons in life, but wanting, perhaps, that +flow of heart which her husband possessed so largely." Of Coleridge's +boyhood and school-days we are fortunate in being able to construct an +unusually clear and complete idea. Both from his own autobiographic +notes, from the traditionary testimony of his family, and from the no +less valuable evidence of his most distinguished schoolfellow, we know +that his youthful character and habits assign him very conspicuously to +that perhaps somewhat small class of eminent men whose boyhood has +given distinct indications of great things to come. Coleridge is as +pronounced a specimen of this class as Scott is of its opposite. Scott +has shown the world how commonplace a boyhood may precede a maturity of +extraordinary powers. In Coleridge's case a boy of truly extraordinary +qualities was father to one of the most remarkable of men. As the +youngest of ten children (or of thirteen, reckoning the vicar's family +of three by his first wife), Coleridge attributes the early bent of his +disposition to causes the potency of which one may be permitted to +think that he has somewhat exaggerated. It is not quite easy to believe +that it was only through "certain jealousies of old Molly," his brother +Frank's "dotingly fond nurse," and the infusions of these jealousies +into his brother's mind, that he was drawn "from life in motion to life +in thought and sensation." The physical impulses of boyhood, where they +exist in vigour, are not so easily discouraged, and it is probable that +they were naturally weaker and the meditative tendency stronger than +Coleridge in after-life imagined. But to continue: "I never played," he +proceeds, "except by myself, and then only acting over what I had been +reading or fancying, or half one, half the other" (a practice common +enough, it may be remarked, among boys of by no means morbidly +imaginative habit), "cutting down weeds and nettles with a stick, as +one of the seven champions of Christendom. Alas! I had all the +simplicity, all the docility of the little child, but none of the +child's habits. I never thought as a child – never had the language of a +child." So it fared with him during the period of his home instruction, +the first eight years of his life; and his father having, as scholar +and schoolmaster, no doubt noted the strange precocity of his youngest +son, appears to have devoted especial attention to his training. "In my +ninth year," he continues, "my most dear, most revered father died +suddenly. O that I might so pass away, if, like him, I were an +Israelite without guile. The image of my father, my revered, kind, +learned, simple-hearted father, is a religion to me."</p> + +<p>Before he had attained his tenth year a presentation to Christ's +Hospital was obtained for him by that eminent judge Mr. Justice Buller, +a former pupil of his father's; and he was entered at the school on the +18th July 1782. His early bent towards poetry, though it displayed +itself in youthful verse of unusual merit, is a less uncommon and +arresting characteristic than his precocious speculative activity. Many +a raw boy "lisps in numbers, for the numbers come;" but few discourse +Alexandrian metaphysics at the same age, for the very good reason that +the metaphysics as a rule do not "come." And even among those youth +whom curiosity, or more often vanity, induces to dabble in such +studies, one would find few indeed over whom they have cast such an +irresistible spell as to estrange them for a while from poetry +altogether. That this was the experience of Coleridge we have his own +words to show. His son and biographer, the Rev. Derwent Coleridge, has +a little antedated the poet's stages of development in stating that +when his father was sent to Christ's Hospital in his eleventh year he +was "already a poet, and yet more characteristically a metaphysician." +A poet, yes, and a precocious scholar perhaps to boot, but a +metaphysician, no; for the "delightful sketch of him by his friend and +schoolfellow Charles Lamb" was pretty evidently taken not at "this +period" of his life but some years later. Coleridge's own account of +the matter in the <i>Biographia Literaria</i> is clear. [<a href="#foot_1-1">1</a>] "At a very +premature age, even before my fifteenth year," he says, "I had +bewildered myself in metaphysics and in theological controversy. +Nothing else pleased me. History and particular facts lost all interest +in my mind. Poetry (though for a schoolboy of that age I was above par +in English versification, and had already produced two or three +compositions which I may venture to say were somewhat above mediocrity, +and which had gained me more credit than the sound good sense of my old +master was at all pleased with), – poetry itself, yea, novels and +romance, became insipid to me." He goes on to describe how highly +delighted he was if, during his friendless wanderings on leave-days, +"any passenger, especially if he were dressed in black," would enter +with him into a conversation, which he soon found the means of +directing to his favourite subject of "providence, foreknowledge, will, +and fate; fixed fate, freewill, foreknowledge absolute." Undoubtedly it +is to this period that one should refer Lamb's well-known description +of "Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Logician, Metaphysician, Bard."</p> + +<p>"How have I seen the casual passer through the cloisters stand still, +entranced with admiration (while he weighed the disproportion between +the speech and the garb of the young Mirandula), to hear thee unfold in +thy deep and sweet intonations the mysteries of Iamblichus or Plotinus +(for even in those years thou waxedst not pale at such philosophic +draughts), or reciting Homer in the Greek, or Pindar, while the walls +of the old Grey Friars re-echoed with the accents of the <i>inspired +charity-boy</i>."</p> + +<p>It is interesting to note such a point as that of the "deep and sweet +intonations" of the youthful voice – its most notable and impressive +characteristic in after-life. Another schoolfellow describes the young +philosopher as "tall and striking in person, with long black hair," and +as commanding "much deference" among his schoolfellows. Such was +Coleridge between his fifteenth and seventeenth year, and such +continued to be the state of his mind and the direction of his studies +until he was won back again from what he calls "a preposterous pursuit, +injurious to his natural powers and to the progress of his education," +by – it is difficult, even after the most painstaking study of its +explanations, to record the phenomenon without astonishment – a perusal +of the sonnets of William Lisle Bowles. Deferring, however, for the +present any research into the occult operation of this converting +agency, it will be enough to note Coleridge's own assurance of its +perfect efficacy. He was completely cured for the time of his +metaphysical malady, and "well were it for me perhaps," he exclaims, +"had I never relapsed into the same mental disease; if I had continued +to pluck the flowers and reap the harvest from the cultivated surface +instead of delving in the unwholesome quicksilver mines of metaphysic +depths." And he goes on to add, in a passage full of the peculiar +melancholy beauty of his prose, and full too of instruction for the +biographer, "But if, in after-time, I have sought a refuge from bodily +pain and mismanaged sensibility in abstruse researches, which exercised +the strength and subtlety of the understanding without awakening the +feelings of the heart, there was a long and blessed interval, during +which my natural faculties were allowed to expand and my original +tendencies to develop themselves – my fancy, and the love of nature, and +the sense of beauty in forms and sounds." This "long and blessed +interval" endured, as we shall see, for some eleven or twelve years.</p> + +<p>His own account of his seduction from the paths of poetry by the wiles +of philosophy is that physiology acted as the go-between. His brother +Luke had come up to London to walk the hospitals, and young Samuel's +insatiable intellectual curiosity immediately inspired him with a +desire to share his brother's pursuit. "Every Saturday I could make or +obtain leave, to the London Hospital trudged I. O! the bliss if I was +permitted to hold the plaisters or attend the dressings.... I became +wild to be apprenticed to a surgeon; English, Latin, yea, Greek books +of medicine read I incessantly. Blanchard's <i>Latin Medical +Dictionary</i> I had nearly by heart. Briefly, it was a wild dream, +which, gradually blending with, gradually gave way to, a rage for +metaphysics occasioned by the essays on Liberty and Necessity in Cato's +<i>Letters</i>, and more by theology." [<a href="#foot_1-2">2</a>] At the appointed hour, +however, Bowles the emancipator came, as has been said, to his relief, +and having opportunely fallen in love with the eldest daughter of a +widow lady of whose son he had been the patron and protector at school, +we may easily imagine that his liberation from the spell of metaphysics +was complete. "From this time," he says, "to my nineteenth year, when I +quitted school for Jesus, Cambridge, was the era of poetry and love."</p> + +<p>Of Coleridge's university days we know less; but the account of his +schoolfellow, Charles Le Grice, accords, so far as it goes, with what +would have been anticipated from the poet's school life. Although "very +studious," and not unambitious of academical honours – within a few +months of his entering at Jesus he won the Browne Gold Medal for a +Greek Ode on the Slave Trade [<a href="#foot_1-3">3</a>] – his reading, his friend admits, was +"desultory and capricious. He took little exercise merely for the sake +of exercise, but he was ready at any time to unbend his mind in +conversation, and for the sake of this his room was a constant +rendezvous of conversation-loving friends. I will not call them +loungers, for they did not call to kill time but to enjoy it." From the +same record we gather that Coleridge's interest in current politics was +already keen, and that he was an eager reader, not only of Burke's +famous contributions thereto, but even a devourer of all the pamphlets +which swarmed during that agitated period from the press. The desultory +student, however, did not altogether intermit his academical studies. +In 1793 he competed for another Greek verse prize, this time +unsuccessfully. He afterwards described his ode <i>On Astronomy</i> as +"the finest Greek poem I ever wrote;" [<a href="#foot_1-4">4</a>] but, whatever may have been +its merits from the point of view of scholarship, the English +translation of it, made eight years after by Southey (in which form +alone it now exists), seems hardly to establish its title to the +peculiar merit claimed by its author for his earlier effort. The long +vacation of this year, spent by him in Devonshire, is also interesting +as having given birth to one of the most characteristic of the +<i>Juvenile Poems,</i> the <i>Songs of the Pixies</i>, and the closing +months of 1793 were marked by the most singular episode in the poet's +earlier career.</p> + +<p>It is now perhaps impossible to ascertain whether the cause of this +strange adventure of Coleridge's was, "chagrin at his disappointment in +a love affair" or "a fit of dejection and despondency caused by some +debts not amounting to a hundred pounds;" but, actuated by some impulse +or other of restless disquietude, Coleridge suddenly quitted Cambridge +and came up, very slenderly provided with money, to London, where, +after a few days' sojourn, he was compelled by pressure of actual need +to enlist, under the name of Silas Titus Comberback (S. T. C.), [<a href="#foot_1-5">5</a>] as a +private in the 15th Light Dragoons. It may seem strange to say so, but +it strikes one as quite conceivable that the world might have been a +gainer if fate had kept Coleridge a little longer in the ranks than the +four months of his actual service. As it was, however, his military +experiences, unlike those of Gibbon, were of no subsequent advantage to +him. He was, as he tells us, an execrable rider, a negligent groom of +his horse, and, generally, a slack and slovenly trooper; but before +drill and discipline had had time to make a smart soldier of him, he +chanced to attract the attention of his captain by having written a +Latin quotation on the white wall of the stables at Reading. This +officer, who it seems was either able to translate the ejaculation, +"Eheu! quam infortunii miserrimum est fuisse felicem," [<a href="#foot_1-6">6</a>] or, at any +rate, to recognise the language it was written in, interested himself +forthwith on behalf of his scholarly recruit. [<a href="#foot_1-7">7</a>] Coleridge's discharge +was obtained at Hounslow on April 10, 1794, and he returned to +Cambridge.</p> + +<p>The year was destined to be eventful for him in more ways than one. In +June he went to Oxford to pay a visit to an old schoolfellow, where an +accidental introduction to Robert Southey, then an undergraduate of +Balliol, laid the foundation of a friendship destined largely to +influence their future lives. In the course of the following August he +came to Bristol, where he was met by Southey, and by him introduced to +Robert Lovell, through whom and Southey he made the acquaintance of two +persons of considerable, if not exactly equal, importance to any young +author – his first publisher and his future wife. Robert Lovell already +knew Mr. Joseph Cottle, brother of Amos Cottle (Byron's "O! Amos +Cottle! Phoebus! what a name"), and himself a poet of some pretensions; +and he had married Mary Fricker, one of whose sisters, Edith, was +already engaged to Southey; while another, Sara, was afterwards to +become Mrs. Coleridge.</p> + +<p>As the marriage turned out on the whole an unhappy one, the present may +be a convenient moment for considering how far its future character was +determined by previously existing and unalterable conditions, and how +far it may be regarded as the result of subsequent events. De Quincey, +whose acute and in many respects most valuable monograph on the poet +touches its point of least trustworthiness in matters of this kind, +declares roundly, and on the alleged authority of Coleridge himself, +that the very primary and essential prerequisite of happiness was +wanting to the union. Coleridge, he says, assured him that his marriage +was "not his own deliberate act, but was in a manner forced upon his +sense of honour by the scrupulous Southey, who insisted that he had +gone too far in his attentions to Miss Fricker for any honourable +retreat." On the other hand, he adds, "a neutral spectator of the +parties protested to me that if ever in his life he had seen a man +under deep fascination, and what he would have called desperately in +love, Coleridge, in relation to Miss F., was that man." One need not, I +think, feel much hesitation in preferring this "neutral spectator's" +statement to that of the discontented husband, made several years after +the mutual estrangement of the couple, and with no great propriety +perhaps, to a new acquaintance. There is abundant evidence in his own +poems alone that at the time of, and for at least two or three years +subsequently to, his marriage Coleridge's feeling towards his wife was +one of profound and indeed of ardent attachment. It is of course quite +possible that the passion of so variable, impulsive, and irresolute a +temperament as his may have had its hot and cold fits, and that during +one of the latter phases Southey may have imagined that his friend +needed some such remonstrance as that referred to. But this is not +nearly enough to support the assertion that Coleridge's marriage was +"in a manner forced upon his sense of honour," and was not his own +deliberate act. It was as deliberate as any of his other acts during +the years 1794 and 1795, – that is to say, it was as wholly inspired by +the enthusiasm of the moment, and as utterly ungoverned by anything in +the nature of calculation on the possibilities of the future. He fell +in love with Sara Fricker as he fell in love with the French Revolution +and with the scheme of "Pantisocracy," and it is indeed extremely +probable that the emotions of the lover and the socialist may have +subtly acted and reacted upon each other. The Pantisocratic scheme was +essentially based at its outset upon a union of kindred souls, for it +was clearly necessary of course that each male member of the little +community to be founded on the banks of the Susquehanna should take +with him a wife. Southey and Lovell had theirs in the persons of two +sisters; they were his friends and fellow-workers in the scheme; and +they had a sympathetic sister-in-law disengaged. Fate therefore seemed +to designate her for Coleridge and with the personal attraction which +she no doubt exerted over him there may well have mingled a dash of +that mysterious passion for symmetry which prompts a man to "complete +the set." After all, too, it must be remembered that, though Mrs. +Coleridge did not permanently retain her hold upon her husband's +affections, she got considerably the better of those who shared them +with her. Coleridge found out the objections to Pantisocracy in a very +short space of time, and a decided coolness had sprung up between him +and Madame la Revolution before another two years had passed.</p> + +<p>The whole history indeed of this latter <i>liaison</i> is most +remarkable, and no one, it seems to me, can hope to form an adequate +conception of Coleridge's essential instability of character without +bestowing somewhat closer attention upon this passage in his +intellectual development than it usually receives. It is not uncommon +to see the cases of Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge lumped together +indiscriminately, as interequivalent illustrations of the way in which +the young and generous minds of that era were first fascinated and then +repelled by the French Revolution. As a matter of fact, however, the +last of the three cases differed in certain very important respects +from the two former. Coleridge not only took the "frenzy-fever" in a +more violent form than either Wordsworth or Southey, and uttered wilder +things in his delirium than they, but the paroxysm was much shorter, +the <i>immediate</i> reaction more violent in its effects and brought +about by slighter causes in his case than in theirs. This will appear +more clearly when we come to contrast the poems of 1794 and 1795 with +those of 1797. For the present it must suffice to say that while the +history of Coleridge's relations to the French Revolution is +intellectually more interesting than that of Wordsworth's and +Southey's, it plainly indicates, even in that early period of the three +lives, a mind far more at the mercy of essentially transitory sentiment +than belonged to either of the others, and far less disposed than +theirs to review the aspirations of the moment by the steady light of +the practical judgment.</p> + +<p>This, however, is anticipating matters. We are still in the summer of +1794, and we left Coleridge at Bristol with Southey, Lovell, and the +Miss Frickers. To this year belongs that remarkable experiment in +playwriting at high pressure, <i>The Fall of Robespierre</i>. It +originated, we learn from Southey, in "a sportive conversation at poor +Lovell's," when each of the three friends agreed to produce one act of +a tragedy, on the subject indicated in the above title, by the +following evening. Coleridge was to write the first, Southey the +second, and Lovell the third. Southey and Lovell appeared the next day +with their acts complete, Coleridge, characteristically, with only a +part of his. Lovell's, however, was found not to be in keeping with the +other two, so Southey supplied the third as well as the second, by +which time Coleridge had completed the first. The tragedy was +afterwards published entire, and is usually included in complete +editions of Coleridge's poetical works. It is an extremely immature +production, abounding in such coquettings (if nothing more serious) +with bathos as</p> + +<p class="verse"> "Now,<br /> + Aloof thou standest from the tottering pillar,<br /> + And like a frighted child behind its mother,<br /> + Hidest thy pale face in the skirts of Mercy."</p> + +<p>and</p> + +<p class="verse">"Liberty, condensed awhile, is bursting<br /> + To scatter the arch-chemist in the explosion."</p> + +<p>Coleridge also contributed to Southey's <i>Joan of Arc</i> certain +lines of which, many years afterwards, he wrote in this humorously +exaggerated but by no means wholly unjust tone of censure: – "I was +really astonished (1) at the schoolboy, wretched, allegoric machinery; +(2) at the transmogrification of the fanatic Virago into a modern +novel-pawing proselyte of the Age of Reason – a Tom Paine in +petticoats; (3) at the utter want of all rhythm in the verse, the +monotony and dead plumb-down of the pauses, and at the absence of all +bone, muscle, and sinew in the single lines."</p> + +<p>In September Coleridge returned to Cambridge, to keep what turned out +to be his last term at Jesus. We may fairly suppose that he had already +made up his mind to bid adieu to the Alma Mater whose bosom he was +about to quit for that of a more venerable and, as he then believed, a +gentler mother on the banks of the Susquehanna; but it is not +impossible that in any case his departure might have been expedited by +the remonstrances of college authority. Dr. Pearce, Master of Jesus, +and afterwards Dean of Ely, did all he could, records a friend of a +somewhat later date, "to keep him within bounds; but his repeated +efforts to reclaim him were to no purpose, and upon one occasion, after +a long discussion on the visionary and ruinous tendency of his later +schemes, Coleridge cut short the argument by bluntly assuring him, his +friend and master, that he mistook the matter altogether. He was +neither Jacobin, [<a href="#foot_1-8">8</a>] he said, nor Democrat, but a Pantisocrat." And, +leaving the good doctor to digest this new and strange epithet, +Coleridge bade farewell to his college and his university, and went +forth into that world with which he was to wage so painful and variable +a struggle.</p> + +<blockquote style="font-variant: small-caps"><strong>Footnotes</strong></blockquote> + +<p><a name="foot_1-1"></a>1. He tells us in the <i>Biographia Literaria</i> that he had +translated the eight hymns of Synesius from the Greek into English +anacreontics "before his fifteenth year." It is reasonable to suppose, +therefore, that he had more scholarship in 1782 than most boys of ten +years.</p> + +<p><a name="foot_1-2"></a>2. Gillman, pp. 22, 23.</p> + +<p><a name="foot_1-3"></a>3. Of this Coleridge afterwards remarked with justice that its "ideas +were better than the language or metre in which they were conveyed." +Porson, with little magnanimity, as De Quincey complains, was severe +upon its Greek, but its main conception – an appeal to Death to come, a +welcome deliverer to the slaves, and to bear them to shores where "they +may tell their beloved ones what horrors they, being men, had endured +from men" – is moving and effective. De Quincey, however, was +undoubtedly right in his opinion that Coleridge's Greek scholarship was +not of the exact order. No exact scholar could, for instance, have died +in the faith (as Coleridge did) that εστησε (S. T. C.) means "he stood," +and not "he placed."</p> + +<p><a name="foot_1-4"></a>4. Adding "that which gained the prize was contemptible" – an +expression of opinion hardly in accordance with Le Grice's statement +("Recollections" in <i>Gentleman's Magazine</i> for 1836) that "no one +was more convinced of the propriety of the decision than Coleridge +himself." Mr. Le Grice, however, bears valuable testimony to +Coleridge's disappointment, though I think he exaggerates its influence +in determining his career.</p> + +<p><a name="foot_1-5"></a>5. It is characteristic of the punctilious inaccuracy of Mr. Cottle +(<i>Recollections</i>, ii. 54) that he should insist that the assumed +name was "Cumberbatch, not Comberback," though Coleridge has himself +fixed the real name by the jest, "My habits were so little equestrian, +that my horse, I doubt not, was of that opinion." This circumstance, +though trifling, does not predispose us to accept unquestioningly Mr. +Cottle's highly particularised account of Coleridge's experience with +his regiment.</p> + +<p><a name="foot_1-6"></a>6. Miss Mitford, in her <i>Recollections of a Literary Life</i>, +interestingly records the active share taken by her father in +procuring the learned trooper's discharge.</p> + +<p><a name="foot_1-7"></a>7. "In omni adversitate fortunæ, infelicissimum genus est infortunii +fuisse felicem." – <i>Boethius</i>.</p> + +<p><a name="foot_1-8"></a>8. Carrlyon's <i>Early Years and late Reflections</i>, vol. i. p. 27.</p> + + + +<a name="chap2"></a> +<h2>Chapter II</h2> + +<blockquote>The Bristol Lectures – Marriage – Life at Clevedon – The <i>Watchman</i> – +Retirement to Stowey – Introduction to Wordsworth.</blockquote> + +<p style="text-align: center">[1794-1797.]</p> + +<p>The reflections of the worthy Master of Jesus upon the strange reply of +the wayward young undergraduate would have been involved in even +greater perplexity if he could have looked forward a few months into +the future. For after a winter spent in London, and enlivened by those +<i>noctes conoque Deûm</i> at the "Cat and Salutation," which Lamb has +so charmingly recorded, Coleridge returned with Southey to Bristol at +the beginning of 1795, and there proceeded to deliver a series of +lectures which, whatever their other merits, would certainly not have +assisted Dr. Pearce to grasp the distinction between a Pantisocrat and +a Jacobin. As a scholar and a man of literary taste he might possibly +have admired the rhetorical force of the following outburst, but, +considering that the "HE" here gibbeted in capitals was no less a +personage than the "heaven-born minister" himself, a plain man might +well have wondered what additional force the vocabulary of Jacobinism +could have infused into the language of Pantisocracy. After summing up +the crimes of the Reign of Terror the lecturer asks: "Who, my brethren, +was the cause of this guilt if not HE who supplied the occasion and the +motive? Heaven hath bestowed on <i>that man</i> a portion of its +ubiquity, and given him an actual presence in the sacraments of hell, +wherever administered, in all the bread of bitterness, in all the cups +of blood." And in general, indeed, the <i>Conciones ad Populum</i>, as +Coleridge named these lectures on their subsequent publication, were +rather calculated to bewilder any of the youthful lecturer's well-wishers who might be anxious for some means of discriminating his +attitude from that of the Hardys, the Horne Tookes, and the Thelwalls +of the day. A little warmth of language might no doubt be allowed to a +young friend of liberty in discussing legislation which, in the +retrospect, has staggered even so staunch a Tory as Sir Archibald +Alison; but Coleridge's denunciation of the Pitt and Grenville Acts, in +the lecture entitled <i>The Plot Discovered</i>, is occasionally +startling, even for that day of fierce passions, in the fierceness of +its language. It is interesting, however, to note the ever-active play +of thought and reasoning amid the very storm and stress of political +passion. Coleridge is never for long together a mere declaimer on +popular rights and ministerial tyranny, and even this indignant address +contains a passage of extremely just and thoughtful analysis of the +constituent elements of despotism. Throughout the spring and summer of +1795 Coleridge continued his lectures at Bristol, his head still +simmering – though less violently, it may be suspected, every month – +with Pantisocracy, and certainly with all his kindred political and +religious enthusiasms unabated.</p> + +<p>A study of these crude but vigorous addresses reveals to us, as does +the earlier of the early poems, a mind struggling with its half-formed +and ever-changing conceptions of the world, and, as is usual at such +peculiar phases of an intellectual development, affirming its temporary +beliefs with a fervour and vehemence directly proportioned to the +recency of their birth. Commenting on the <i>Conciones ad Populum</i> +many years afterwards, and invoking them as witnesses to his political +consistency as an author, Coleridge remarked that with the exception of +"two or three pages involving the doctrine of philosophical necessity +and Unitarianism," he saw little or nothing in these outbursts of his +youthful zeal to retract, and, with the exception of "some flame-coloured epithets" applied to persons, as to Mr. Pitt and others, "or +rather to personifications" – for such, he says, they really were to +him – as little to regret.</p> + +<p>We now, however, arrive at an event, important in the life of every +man, and which influenced that of Coleridge to an extent not the less +certainly extraordinary because difficult, if not impossible, to define +with exactitude. On the 4th of October 1795 Coleridge was married at +St. Mary Redcliffe Church, Bristol, to Sarah (or as he preferred to +spell it Sara) Fricker, and withdrew for a time from the eager +intellectual life of a political lecturer to the contemplative quiet +appropriate to the honeymoon of a poet, spent in a sequestered cottage +amid beautiful scenery, and within sound of the sea. No wonder that +among such surroundings, and with such belongings, the honeymoon should +have extended from one month to three, and indeed that Coleridge should +have waited till his youthful yearnings for a life of action, and +perhaps (though that would have lent itself less gracefully to his poem +of farewell to his Clevedon cottage) his increasing sense of the +necessity of supplementing the ambrosia of love with the bread and +cheese of mortals, compelled him to re-enter the world. No wonder he +should have delayed to do so, for it is as easy to perceive in his +poems that these were days of unclouded happiness as it is melancholy +to reflect by how few others like them his life was destined to be +brightened. The <i>Æolian Harp</i> has no more than the moderate +merits, with its full share of the characteristic faults, of his +earlier productions; but one cannot help "reading into it" the poet's +after-life of disappointment and disillusion – estrangement from the +"beloved woman" in whose affection he was then reposing; decay and +disappearance of those "flitting phantasies" with which he was then so +joyously trifling, and the bitterly ironical scholia which fate was +preparing for such lines as</p> + +<p class="verse"> "And tranquil muse upon tranquillity."</p> + +<p>One cannot in fact refrain from mentally comparing the <i>'olian +Harp</i> of 1795 with the <i>Dejection</i> of 1803, and no one who has +thoroughly felt the spirit of both poems can make that comparison +without emotion. The former piece is not, as has been said, in a +literary sense remarkable. With the exception of the one point of +metrical style, to be touched on presently, it has almost no note of +poetic distinction save such as belongs of right to any simple record +of a mood which itself forms the highest poetry of the average man's +life; and one well knows whence came the criticism of that MS. note +inscribed by S. T. C. in a copy of the second edition of his early +poems, "This I think the most perfect poem I ever wrote. Bad may be the +best perhaps." One feels that the annotator might just as well have +written, "How perfect was the happiness which this poem recalls!" for +this is really all that Coleridge's eulogium, with its touching bias +from the hand of memory, amounts to.</p> + +<p>It has become time, however, to speak more generally of Coleridge's +early poems. The peaceful winter months of 1795-96 were in all +likelihood spent in arranging and revising the products of those poetic +impulses which had more or less actively stirred within him from his +seventeenth year upwards; and in April 1797 there appeared at Bristol a +volume of some fifty pieces entitled <i>Poems on Various Subjects, by +S. T. Coleridge, late of Jesus College Cambridge</i>. It was published +by his friend Cottle, who, in a mixture of the generous with the +speculative instinct, had given him thirty guineas for the copyright. +Its contents are of a miscellaneous kind, consisting partly of rhymed +irregular odes, partly of a collection of <i>Sonnets on Eminent +Characters</i>, and partly (and principally) of a blank verse poem of +several hundred lines, then, and indeed for years afterwards, regarded +by many of the poet's admirers as his masterpiece – the <i>Religious +Musings</i>. [<a href="#foot_2-1">1</a>]</p> + +<p>To the second edition of these poems, which was published in the +following year, Coleridge, at all times a candid critic (to the limited +extent to which it is possible even for the finest judges to be so) of +his own works, prefixed a preface, wherein he remarks that his poems +have been "rightly charged with a profusion of double epithets and a +general turgidness," and adds that he has "pruned the double epithets +with no sparing hand," and used his best efforts to tame the swell and +glitter both of thought and diction. "The latter fault, however, had," +he continues, "so insinuated itself into my <i>Religious Musings</i> +with such intricacy of union that sometimes I have omitted to +disentangle the weed from fear of snapping the flower." This is plain-spoken criticism, but I do not think that any reader who is competent +to pronounce judgment on the point will be inclined to deprecate its +severity. Nay, in order to get done with fault-finding as soon as +possible, it must perhaps be added that the admitted turgidness of the +poems is often something more than a mere defect of style, and that the +verse is turgid because the feeling which it expresses is exaggerated. +The "youthful bard unknown to fame" who, in the <i>Songs of the +Pixies</i>, is made to "heave the gentle misery of a sigh," is only +doing a natural thing described in ludicrously and unnaturally stilted +terms; but the young admirer of the <i>Robbers</i>, who informs +Schiller that if he were to meet him in the evening wandering in his +loftier mood "beneath some vast old tempest-swinging wood," he would +"gaze upon him awhile in mute awe" and then "weep aloud in a wild +ecstasy," endangers the reader's gravity not so much by extravagance of +diction as by over-effusiveness of sentiment. The former of these two +offences differs from the latter by the difference between "fustian" +and "gush." And there is, in fact, more frequent exception to be taken +to the character of the thought in these poems than to that of the +style. The remarkable gift of eloquence, which seems to have belonged +to Coleridge from boyhood, tended naturally to aggravate that very +common fault of young poets whose faculty of expression has outstripped +the growth of their intellectual and emotional experiences – the fault +of wordiness. Page after page of the poems of 1796 is filled with what +one cannot, on the most favourable terms, rank higher than rhetorical +commonplace; stanza after stanza falls pleasantly upon the ear without +suggesting any image sufficiently striking to arrest the eye of the +imagination, or awakening any thought sufficiently novel to lay hold +upon the mind. The <i>Æolian Harp</i> has been already referred to as a +pleasing poem, and reading it, as we must, in constant recollection of +the circumstances in which it was written, it unquestionably is so. But +in none of the descriptions either of external objects or of internal +feeling which are to be found in this and its companion piece, the +<i>Reflections on having left a Place of Retirement</i>, is there +anything which can fairly be said to elevate them above the level of +graceful verse. It is only in the region of the fantastic and +supernatural that Coleridge's imagination, as he was destined to show +by a far more splendid example two years afterwards, seems to acquire +true poetic distinction. It is in the <i>Songs of the Pixies</i> that +the young man "heaves the gentle misery of a sigh," and the sympathetic +interest of the reader of today is chilled by the too frequent +intrusion of certain abstract ladies, each preceded by her capital +letter and attended by her "adjective-in-waiting;" but, after all +deductions for the conventionalisms of "white-robed Purity," "meek-eyed +Pity," "graceful Ease," etc., one cannot but feel that the <i>Songs of +the Pixies</i> was the offspring not of a mere abundant and picturesque +vocabulary but of a true poetic fancy. It is worth far more as an +earnest of future achievement than the very unequal <i>Monody on the +Death of Chatterton</i> (for which indeed we ought to make special +allowance, as having been commenced in the author's eighteenth year), +and certainly than anything which could be quoted from the +<i>Effusions</i>, as Coleridge, unwilling to challenge comparison with +the divine Bowles, had chosen to describe his sonnets. It must be +honestly said indeed that these are, a very few excepted, among the +least satisfactory productions of any period of his poetic career. The +Coleridgian sonnet is not only imperfect in form and in marked contrast +in the frequent bathos of its close to the steady swell and climax of +Wordsworth, but, in by far the majority of instances in this volume, it +is wanting in internal weight. The "single pebble" of thought which a +sonnet should enclose is not only not neatly wrapped up in its envelope +of words, but it is very often not heavy enough to carry itself and its +covering to the mark. When it is so, its weight, as in the sonnet to +Pitt, is too frequently only another word for an ephemeral violence of +political feeling which, whether displayed on one side or the other, +cannot be expected to reproduce its effect in the minds of +comparatively passionless posterity. Extravagances, too, abound, as +when in <i>Kosciusko</i> Freedom is made to look as if, in a fit of +"wilfulness and sick despair," she had drained a mystic urn containing +all the tears that had ever found "fit channel on a Patriot's furrowed +cheek." The main difficulty of the metre, too – that of avoiding forced +rhymes – is rarely surmounted. Even in the three fine lines in the +<i>Burke</i> – -</p> + +<p class="verse"> "Thee stormy Pity and the cherished lure<br /> + Of Pomp and proud precipitance of soul,<br /> + Wildered with meteor fires" – </p> + +<p>we cannot help feeling that "lure" is extremely harsh, while the +weakness of the two concluding lines of the sonnet supplies a typical +example of the disappointment which these "effusions" so often prepare +for their readers.</p> + +<p>Enough, however, has been said of the faults of these early poems; it +remains to consider their merits, foremost among which, as might be +expected, is the wealth and splendour of their diction in these +passages, in which such display is all that is needed for the literary +ends of the moment. Over all that wide region of literature, in which +force and fervour of utterance, depth and sincerity of feeling avail, +without the nameless magic of poetry in the higher sense of the word, +to achieve the objects of the writer and to satisfy the mind of the +reader, Coleridge ranges with a free and sure footstep. It is no +disparagement to his <i>Religious Musings</i> to say that it is to this +class of literature that it belongs. Having said this, however, it must +be added that poetry of the second order has seldom risen to higher +heights of power. The faults already admitted disfigure it here and +there. We have "moon blasted Madness when he yells at midnight;" we +read of "eye-starting wretches and rapture-trembling seraphim," and the +really striking image of Ruin, the "old hag, unconquerable, huge, +Creation's eyeless drudge," is marred by making her "nurse" an +"impatient earthquake." But there is that in Coleridge's aspirations +and apostrophes to the Deity which impresses one even more profoundly +than the mere magnificence, remarkable as it is, of their rhetorical +clothing. They are touched with so penetrating a sincerity; they are so +obviously the outpourings of an awe-struck heart. Indeed, there is +nothing more remarkable at this stage of Coleridge's poetic development +than the instant elevation which his verse assumes whenever he passes +to Divine things. At once it seems to take on a Miltonic majesty of +diction and a Miltonic stateliness of rhythm. The tender but low-lying +domestic sentiment of the <i>Æolian Harp</i> is in a moment informed by +it with the dignity which marks that poem's close. Apart too from its +literary merits, the biographical interest of <i>Religious Musings</i> +is very considerable. "Written," as its title declares, but in reality, +as its length would suggest and as Mr. Cottle in fact tells us, only +<i>completed</i>, "on the Christmas eve of 1794," it gives expression +to the tumultuous emotions by which Coleridge's mind was agitated at +this its period of highest political excitement. His revolutionary +enthusiasm was now at its hottest, his belief in the infant French +Republic at its fullest, his wrath against the "coalesced kings" at its +fiercest, his contempt for their religious pretence at its bitterest. +"Thee to defend," he cries,</p> + +<p class="verse"> "Thee to defend, dear Saviour of mankind!<br /> + Thee, Lamb of God! Thee, blameless Prince of Peace!<br /> + From all sides rush the thirsty brood of war –<br /> + Austria, and that foul Woman of the North,<br /> + The lustful murderess of her wedded lord,<br /> + And he, connatural mind! whom (in their songs,<br /> + So bards of elder time had haply feigned)<br /> + Some Fury fondled in her hate to man,<br /> + Bidding her serpent hair in tortuous fold<br /> + Lick his young face, and at his mouth imbreathe<br /> + Horrible sympathy!"</p> + +<p>This is vigorous poetic invective; and the effect of such outbursts is +heightened by the rapid subsidence of the passion that inspires them +and the quick advent of a calmer mood. We have hardly turned the page +ere denunciations of Catherine and Frederick William give place to +prayerful invocations of the Supreme Being, which are in their turn the +prelude of a long and beautiful contemplative passage: "In the prim'val +age, a dateless while," etc., on the pastoral origin of human society. +It is as though some sweet and solemn strain of organ music had +succeeded to the blast of war-bugles and the roll of drums. In the +<i>Ode to the Departing Year</i>, written in the last days of 1796, +with its "prophecy of curses though I pray fervently for blessings" +upon the poet's native country, the mood is more uniform in its gloom; +and it lacks something, therefore, of those peculiar qualities which +make the <i>Religious Musings</i> one perhaps of the most pleasing of +all Coleridge's earlier productions. But it shares with the poems +shortly to be noticed what may be called the autobiographic charm. The +fresh natural emotion of a young and brilliant mind is eternally +interesting, and Coleridge's youthful Muse, with a frankness of self-disclosure which is not the less winning because at times it provokes a +smile, confides to us even the history of her most temporary moods. It +is, for instance, at once amusing and captivating to read in the latest +edition of the poems, as a footnote to the lines – </p> + +<p class="verse"> "Not yet enslaved, not wholly vile,<br /> + O Albion! O my mother isle!"</p> + +<p>the words – </p> + +<p class="verse"> "O doomed to fall, enslaved and vile – 1796."</p> + +<p>Yes; in 1796 and till the end of 1797 the poet's native country +<i>was</i> in his opinion all these dreadful things, but, directly the +mood changes, the verse alters, and to the advantage, one cannot but +think, of the beautiful and often-quoted close of the passage – </p> + +<p class="verse">"And Ocean mid his uproar wild<br /> + Speaks safety to his island child.<br /> + Hence for many a fearless age<br /> + Has social Quiet loved thy shore,<br /> + Nor ever proud invader's rage,<br /> + Or sacked thy towers or stained thy fields with gore."</p> + +<p>And whether we view him in his earlier or his later mood there is a +certain strange dignity of utterance, a singular confidence in his own +poetic mission, which forbids us to smile at this prophet of four-and-twenty who could thus conclude his menacing vaticinations: – </p> + +<p class="verse"> "Away, my soul, away!<br /> + I, unpartaking of the evil thing,<br /> + With daily prayer and daily toil<br /> + Soliciting for food my scanty soil,<br /> + Have wailed my country with a loud lament.<br /> + Now I recentre my immortal mind<br /> + In the deep Sabbath of meek self-content,<br /> + Cleansed from the vaporous passions which bedim<br /> + God's image, sister of the Seraphim."</p> + +<p>If ever the consciousness of great powers and the assurance of a great +future inspired a youth with perfect and on the whole well-warranted +fearlessness of ridicule it has surely done so here.</p> + +<p>Poetry alone, however, formed no sufficient outlet for Coleridge's +still fresh political enthusiasm – an enthusiasm which now became too +importunate to let him rest in his quiet Clevedon cottage. Was it +right, he cries in his lines of leave-taking to his home, that he +should dream away the entrusted hours "while his unnumbered brethren +toiled and bled"? The propaganda of Liberty was to be pushed forward; +the principles of Unitarianism, to which Coleridge had become a convert +at Cambridge, were to be preached. Is it too prosaic to add that what +poor Henri Murger calls the "chasse aux piecè de cent sous" was in all +probability demanding peremptorily to be resumed?</p> + +<p>Anyhow it so fell out that in the spring of the year 1796 Coleridge +took his first singular plunge into the unquiet waters of journalism, +instigated thereto by "sundry philanthropists and anti-polemists," +whose names he does not record, but among whom we may conjecturally +place Mr. Thomas Poole of Stowey, with whom he had formed what was +destined to be one of the longest and closest friendships of his life. +Which of the two parties – the advisers or the advised – was responsible +for the general plan of this periodical and for the arrangements for +its publication is unknown; but one of these last-mentioned details is +enough to indicate that there could have been no "business head" among +them. Considering that the motto of the <i>Watchman</i> declared the +object of its issue to be that "all might know the truth, and that the +truth might make them free," it is to be presumed that the promoters of +the scheme were not unwilling to secure as many subscribers as possible +for their sheet of "thirty-two pages, large octavo, closely printed, +price only fourpence." In order, however, to exempt it from the stamp-tax, and with the much less practical object of making it "contribute +as little as possible to the supposed guilt of a war against freedom," +it was to be published on every eighth day, so that the week-day of its +appearance would of course vary with each successive week – an +arrangement as ingeniously calculated to irritate and alienate its +public as any perhaps that the wit of man could have devised. So, +however, it was to be, and accordingly with "a naming prospectus, +'Knowledge is Power,' to cry the state of the political atmosphere," +Coleridge set off on a tour to the north, from Bristol to Sheffield, +for the purpose of procuring customers, preaching Unitarian sermons by +the way in most of the great towns, "as an hireless volunteer in a blue +coat and white waistcoat that not a rag of the woman of Babylon might +be seen on me." How he sped upon his mission is related by him with +infinite humour in the <i>Biographia Literaria</i>. He opened the +campaign at Birmingham upon a Calvinist tallow-chandler, who, after +listening to half an hour's harangue, extending from "the captivity of +the nations" to "the near approach of the millennium," and winding up +with a quotation describing the latter "glorious state" out of the +<i>Religious Musings</i>, inquired what might be the cost of the new +publication. Deeply sensible of "the anti-climax, the abysmal bathos" +of the answer, Coleridge replied, "Only fourpence, each number to be +published every eighth day," upon which the tallow-chandler observed +doubtfully that that came to "a deal of money at the end of the year." +What determined him, however, to withhold his patronage was not the +price of the article but its quantity, and not the deficiency of that +quantity but its excess. Thirty-two pages, he pointed out, was more +than he ever read all the year round, and though "as great a one as any +man in Brummagem for liberty and truth, and them sort of things, he +begged to be excused." Had it been possible to arrange for supplying +him with sixteen pages of the paper for twopence, a bargain might no +doubt have been struck; but he evidently had a business-like repugnance +to anything in the nature of "over-trading." Equally unsuccessful was a +second application made at Manchester to a "stately and opulent +wholesale dealer in cottons," who thrust the prospectus into his pocket +and turned his back upon the projector, muttering that he was "overrun +with these articles." This, however, was Coleridge's last attempt at +canvassing. His friends at Birmingham persuaded him to leave that work +to others, their advice being no doubt prompted, in part at least, by +the ludicrous experience of his qualifications as a canvasser which the +following incident furnished them. The same tradesman who had +introduced him to the patriotic tallow-chandler entertained him at +dinner, and, after the meal, invited his guest to smoke a pipe with him +and "two or three other <i>illuminati</i> of the same rank." The +invitation was at first declined on the plea of an engagement to spend +the evening with a minister and his friends, and also because, writes +Coleridge, "I had never smoked except once or twice in my lifetime, and +then it was herb-tobacco mixed with Oronooko." His host, however, +assured him that the tobacco was equally mild, and "seeing, too, that +it was of a yellow colour," he took half a pipe of it, "filling the +lower half of the bowl," for some unexplained reason, "with salt." He +was soon, however, compelled to resign it "in consequence of a +giddiness and distressful feeling" in his eyes, which, as he had drunk +but a single glass of ale, he knew must have been the effect of the +tobacco. Deeming himself recovered after a short interval, he sallied +forth to fulfil the evening's engagement; but the symptoms returned +with the walk and the fresh air, and he had scarcely entered the +minister's drawing-room and opened a packet of letters awaiting him +there than he "sank back on the sofa in a sort of swoon rather than +sleep." Fortunately he had had time to inform his new host of the +confused state of his feelings and of its occasion; for "here and thus +I lay," he continues, "my face like a wall that is whitewashing, +deathly pale, and with the cold drops of perspiration running down it +from my forehead; while one after another there dropped in the +different gentlemen who had been invited to meet and spend the evening +with me, to the number of from fifteen to twenty. As the poison of +tobacco acts but for a short time, I at length awoke from insensibility +and looked round on the party, my eyes dazzled by the candles, which +had been lighted in the interim. By way of relieving my embarrassment +one of the gentlemen began the conversation with: 'Have you seen a +paper to-day, Mr. Coleridge?' 'Sir,' I replied, rubbing my eyes, 'I am +far from convinced that a Christian is permitted to read either +newspapers or any other works of merely political and temporary +interest.'" The incongruity of this remark, with the purpose for which +the speaker was known to have visited Birmingham, and to assist him in +which the company had assembled, produced, as was natural, "an +involuntary and general burst of laughter," and the party spent, we are +told, a most delightful evening. Both then and afterwards, however, +they all joined in dissuading the young projector from proceeding with +his scheme, assuring him "in the most friendly and yet most flattering +expressions" that the employment was neither fit for him nor he for the +employment. They insisted that at any rate "he should make no more +applications in person, but carry on the canvass by proxy," a +stipulation which we may well believe to have been prompted as much by +policy as by good nature. The same hospitable reception, the same +dissuasion, and, that failing, the same kind exertions on his behalf, +he met with at Manchester, Derby, Nottingham, and every other place he +visited; and the result of his tour was that he returned with nearly a +thousand names on the subscription list of the <i>Watchman</i>, +together with "something more than a half conviction that prudence +dictated the abandonment of the scheme." Nothing but this, however, was +needed to induce him to persevere with it. To know that a given course +of conduct was the dictate of prudence was a sort of presumptive proof +to him at this period of life that the contrary was the dictate of +duty. In due time, or rather out of due time, – for the publication of +the first number was delayed beyond the day announced for it, – the +<i>Watchman</i> appeared. Its career was brief – briefer, indeed, than +it need have been. A naturally short life was suicidally shortened. In +the second number, records Coleridge, with delightful <i>naïveté</i>, +"an essay against fast-days, with a most censurable application of a +text from Isaiah [<a href="#foot_2-2">2</a>] for its motto, lost me near five hundred +subscribers at one blow." In the two following numbers he made enemies +of all his Jacobin and democratic patrons by playing Balaam to the +legislation of the Government, and pronouncing something almost like a +blessing on the "gagging bills" – measures he declared which, "whatever +the motive of their introduction, would produce an effect to be desired +by all true friends of freedom, as far as they should contribute to +deter men from openly declaiming on subjects the principles of which +they had never bottomed, and from pleading to the poor and ignorant +instead of pleading for them." At the same time the editor of the +<i>Watchman</i> avowed his conviction that national education and a +concurring spread of the Gospel were the indispensable conditions of +any true political amelioration. We can hardly wonder on the whole that +by the time the seventh number was published its predecessors were +being "exposed in sundry old iron shops at a penny a piece."</p> + +<p>And yet, like everything which came from Coleridge's hand, this +immature and unpractical production has an interest of its own. Amid +the curious mixture of actuality and abstract disquisition of which +each number of the <i>Watchman</i> is made up, we are arrested again +and again by some striking metaphor or some weighty sentence which +tells us that the writer is no mere wordy wielder of a facile pen. The +paper on the slave trade in the seventh number is a vigorous and, in +places, a heart-stirring appeal to the humane emotions. There are +passages in it which foreshadow Coleridge's more mature literary +manner – the manner of the great pulpit orators of the seventeenth +century – in a very interesting way. [<a href="#foot_2-3">3</a>] But what was the use of No. IV +containing an effective article like this when No. III. had opened with +an "Historical Sketch of the Manners and Religion of the Ancient +Germans, introductory to a sketch of the Manners, Religion, and +Politics of present Germany"? This to a public who wanted to read about +Napoleon and Mr. Pitt! No. III. in all probability "choked off" a good +proportion of the commonplace readers who might have been well content +to have put up with the humanitarian rhetoric of No. IV., if only for its +connection with so unquestionable an actuality as West Indian sugar. It +was, anyhow, owing to successive alienations of this kind that on +13th May 1796 the editor of the <i>Watchman</i> was compelled to bid +farewell to his few remaining readers in the tenth number of his +periodical, for the "short and satisfactory" reason that "the work does +not pay its expenses." "Part of my readers," continues Coleridge, +"relinquished it because it did not contain sufficient original +composition, and a still larger part because it contained too much;" +and he then proceeds with that half-humorous simplicity of his to +explain what excellent reasons there were why the first of these +classes should transfer their patronage to Flower's <i>Cambridge +Intelligencer</i>, and the second theirs to the <i>New Monthly +Magazine</i>.</p> + +<p>It is not, however, for the biographer or the world to regret the short +career of the <i>Watchman</i>, since its decease left Coleridge's mind +in undivided allegiance to the poetic impulse at what was destined to +be the period of its greatest power. In the meantime one result of the +episode had been to make a not unimportant addition to his friendships. +Mention has already been made of his somewhat earlier acquaintance with +Mr. Thomas Poole of Nether Stowey, a man of high intelligence and mark +in his time; and it was in the course of his northern peregrinations in +search of subscribers that he met with Charles Lloyd. This young man, +the son of an eminent Birmingham banker, was so struck with Coleridge's +genius and eloquence as to conceive an "ardent desire to domesticate +himself permanently with a man whose conversation was to him as a +revelation from heaven;" and shortly after the decease of the +<i>Watchman</i> he obtained his parents' consent to the arrangement.</p> + +<p>Early, therefore, in the year 1797 Coleridge, accompanied by Charles +Lloyd, removed to Nether Stowey in Somersetshire, where he occupied a +cottage placed at his disposal by Mr. Poole. His first employment in +his new abode appears to have been the preparation of the second +edition of his poems. In the new issue nineteen pieces of the former +publication were discarded and twelve new ones added, the most +important of which was the <i>Ode to the Departing Year</i>, which had +first appeared in the <i>Cambridge Intelligencer</i>, and had been +immediately afterwards republished in a separate form as a thin quarto +pamphlet, together with some lines of no special merit "addressed to a +young man of fortune" (probably Charles Lloyd), "who abandoned himself +to an indolent and causeless melancholy." To the new edition were added +the preface already quoted from, and a prose introduction to the +sonnets. The volume also contained some poems by Charles Lloyd and an +enlarged collection of sonnets and other pieces by Charles Lamb, the +latter of whom about the time of its publication paid his first visit +to the friend with whom, ever since leaving Christ's Hospital, he had +kept up a constant and, to the student of literature, a most +interesting correspondence. [<a href="#foot_2-4">4</a>] In June 1797 Charles and Mary Lamb +arrived at the Stowey cottage to find their host disabled by an +accident which prevented him from walking during their whole stay. It +was during their absence on a walking expedition that he composed the +pleasing lines – </p> + +<p class='verse'> "The lime-tree bower my prison,"</p> + +<p>in which he thrice applies to his friend that epithet which gave such +humorous annoyance to the "gentle-hearted Charles." [<a href="#foot_2-5">5</a>]</p> + +<p>But a greater than Lamb, if one may so speak without offence to the +votaries of that rare humorist and exquisite critic, had already made +his appearance on the scene. Some time before this visit of Lamb's to +Stowey Coleridge had made the acquaintance of the remarkable man who +was destined to influence his literary career in many ways importantly, +and in one way decisively. It was in the month of June 1797, and at the +village of Racedown in Dorsetshire, that he first met William +Wordsworth.</p> + +<blockquote style="font-variant: small-caps"><strong>Footnotes</strong></blockquote> + +<p><a name="foot_2-1"></a>1. The volume contained also three sonnets by Charles Lamb, one of +which was destined to have a somewhat curious history.</p> + +<p><a name="foot_2-2"></a>2. "Wherefore my bowels shall sound like an harp." – Is. xvi. 11.</p> + +<p><a name="foot_2-3"></a>3. Take for instance this sentence: "Our own sorrows, like the Princes +of Hell in Milton's Pandemonium, sit enthroned 'bulky and vast;' while +the miseries of our fellow-creatures dwindle into pigmy forms, and are +crowded in an innumerable multitude into some dark corner of the +heart." Both in character of imagery and in form of structure we have +here the germ of such passages as this which one might confidently defy +the most accomplished literary "taster" to distinguish from Jeremy +Taylor: "Or like two rapid streams that at their first meeting within +narrow and rocky banks mutually strive to repel each other, and +intermix reluctantly and in tumult, but soon finding a wider channel +and more yielding shores, blend and dilate and flow on in one current +and with one voice." – <i>Biog. Lit.</i> p. 155.</p> + +<p><a name="foot_2-4"></a>4. Perhaps a "correspondence" of which only one side exists may be +hardly thought to deserve that name. Lamb's letters to Coleridge are +full of valuable criticism on their respective poetical efforts. +Unfortunately in, it is somewhat strangely said, "a fit of dejection" +he destroyed all Coleridge's letters to him.</p> + +<p><a name="foot_2-5"></a>5. Lamb's Correspondence with Coleridge, Letter XXXVII.</p> + + + +<a name="chap3"></a> +<h2>Chapter III</h2> + +<blockquote>Coleridge and Wordsworth – Publication of the <i>Lyrical +Ballads</i> – The <i>Ancient Mariner</i> – The first part of +<i>Christabel</i> – Decline of Coleridge's poetic impulse-Final + review of his poetry. </blockquote> + +<p style="text-align: enter"> [1797-1799.]</p> + +<p>The years 1797 and 1798 are generally and justly regarded as the +blossoming-time of Coleridge's poetic genius. It would be scarcely an +exaggeration to say that they were even more than this, and that within +the brief period covered by them is included not only the development +of the poet's powers to their full maturity but the untimely beginnings +of their decline. For to pass from the poems written by Coleridge +within these two years to those of later origin is like passing from +among the green wealth of summer foliage into the well-nigh naked woods +of later autumn. During 1797 and 1798 the <i>Ancient Mariner</i>, the +first part of <i>Christabel</i>, the fine ode to France, the <i>Fears +in Solitude</i>, the beautiful lines entitled <i>Frost at Midnight</i>, +the <i>Nightingale</i>, the <i>Circassian Love-Chant</i>, the piece known +as <i>Love</i> from the poem of the <i>Dark Ladie</i>, and that strange +fragment <i>Kubla Khan</i>, were all of them written and nearly all +of them published; while between the last composed of these and +that swan-song of his dying Muse, the <i>Dejection</i>, of 1802, there +is but one piece to be added to the list of his greater works. This +therefore, the second part of <i>Christabel</i> (1800), may almost be +described by the picturesque image in the first part of the same poem +as</p> + +<p> "The one red leaf, the last of its clan, + Hanging so light and hanging so high, + On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky."</p> + +<p>The first to fail him of his sources of inspiration was his +revolutionary enthusiasm; and the ode to France – the <i>Recantation</i>, +as it was styled on its first appearance in the <i>Morning Post</i> – is the +record of a reaction which, as has been said, was as much speedier in +Coleridge's case than in that of the other ardent young minds which had +come under the spell of the Revolution as his enthusiasm had been more +passionate than theirs. In the winter of 1797-98 the Directory had +plunged France into an unnatural conflict with her sister Republic of +Switzerland, and Coleridge, who could pardon and had pardoned her +fierce animosity against a country which he considered not so much his +own as Pitt's, was unable to forgive her this. In the <i>Recantation</i> +he casts her off for ever; he perceives at last that true liberty is not +to be obtained through political, but only through spiritual emancipation; +that – </p> + +<p> "The sensual and the dark rebel in vain, + Slaves by their own compulsion! In mad game + They burst their manacles, and wear the name + Of Freedom graven on a heavier chain";</p> + +<p>and arrives in a noble peroration at the somewhat unsatisfactory +conclusion, that the spirit of liberty, "the guide of homeless winds +and playmate of the waves," is to be found only among the elements, and +not in the institutions of man. And in the same quaintly ingenuous +spirit which half touches and half amuses us in his earlier poems he +lets us perceive a few weeks later, in his <i>Fears in Solitude</i>, +that sympathy with a foreign nation threatened by the invader may +gradually develop into an almost filial regard for one's own similarly +situated land. He has been deemed, he says, an enemy of his country.</p> + +<p> "But, O dear Britain! O my mother Isle,"</p> + +<p>once, it may be remembered, "doomed to fall enslaved and vile," but +now – </p> + +<p> "Needs must them prove a name most dear and holy, + To me a son, a brother, and a friend, + A husband and a father! who revere + All bonds of natural love, and find them all + Within the limits of thy rocky shores."</p> + +<p>After all, it has occurred to him, England is not only the England of +Pitt and Grenville, and in that capacity the fitting prey of the +insulted French Republic: she is also the England of Sara Coleridge, +and little Hartley, and of Mr. Thomas Poole of Nether Stowey. And so, +to be sure, she was in 1796 when her downfall was predicted, and in the +spirit rather of the Old Testament than of the New. But there is +something very engaging in the candour with which the young poet +hastens to apprise us of this his first awakening to the fact.</p> + +<p><i>France</i> may be regarded as the last ode, and <i>Fears in +Solitude</i> as the last blank-verse poem of any importance, that owe +their origin to Coleridge's early political sentiments. Henceforth, and +for the too brief period of his poetic activity, he was to derive his +inspiration from other sources. The most fruitful and important of +these was unquestionably his intercourse with Wordsworth, from whom, +although there was doubtless a reciprocation of influence between +them, his much more receptive nature took a far deeper impression than +it made. [<a href="#foot_3-1">1</a>] At the time of their meeting he had already for some three +years been acquainted with Wordsworth's works as a poet, and it speaks +highly for his discrimination that he was able to discern the great +powers of his future friend, even in work so immature in many respects +as the <i>Descriptive Sketches</i>. It was during the last year of his +residence at Cambridge that he first met with these poems, of which he +says in the <i>Biographia Literaria</i> that "seldom, if ever, was the +emergence of an original poetic genius above the literary horizon more +evidently announced;" and the effect produced by this volume was +steadily enhanced by further acquaintance both with the poet and his +works. Nothing, indeed, is so honourably noticeable and even touching +in Coleridge's relation to his friend as the tone of reverence with +which, even in the days of his highest self-confidence and even almost +haughty belief in the greatness of his own poetic mission, he was +accustomed to speak of Wordsworth. A witness, to be more fully cited +hereafter, and whose testimony is especially valuable as that of one +who was by no means blind to Coleridge's early foible of self-complacency, has testified to this unbounded admiration of his brother-poet. "When," records this gentleman, "we have sometimes spoken +complimentarily to Coleridge of himself he has said that he was nothing +in comparison with Wordsworth." And two years before this, at a time +when they had not yet tested each other's power in literary +collaboration, he had written to Cottle to inform him of his +introduction to the author of "near twelve hundred lines of blank +verse, superior, I dare aver, to anything in our language which in any +way resembles it," and had declared with evident sincerity that he felt +"a little man" by Wordsworth's side.</p> + +<p>His own impression upon his new friend was more distinctively personal +in its origin. It was by Coleridge's total individuality, by the sum of +his vast and varied intellectual powers, rather than by the specific +poetic element contained in them, that Wordsworth, like the rest of the +world indeed, was in the main attracted; but it is clear enough that +this attraction was from the first most powerful. On that point we have +not only the weighty testimony of Dorothy Wordsworth, as conveyed in +her often-quoted description [<a href="#foot_3-2">2</a>] of her brother's new acquaintance, but +the still more conclusive evidence of her brother's own acts. He gave +the best possible proof of the fascination which had been exercised +over him by quitting Racedown with his sister for Alfoxden near Nether +Stowey within a few weeks of his first introduction to Coleridge, a +change of abode for which, as Miss Wordsworth has expressly recorded, +"our principal inducement was Coleridge's society."</p> + +<p>By a curious coincidence the two poets were at this time simultaneously +sickening for what may perhaps be appropriately called the "poetic +measles." They were each engaged in the composition of a five-act +tragedy, and read scenes to each other, and to each other's admiration, +from their respective dramas. Neither play was fortunate in its +immediate destiny. Wordsworth's tragedy, the <i>Borderers</i>, was +greatly commended by London critics and decisively rejected by the +management of Covent Garden. As for Coleridge, the negligent Sheridan +did not even condescend to acknowledge the receipt of his manuscript; +his play was passed from hand to hand among the Drury Lane Committee; +but not till many years afterwards did <i>Osorio</i> find its way under +another name to the footlights.</p> + +<p>For the next twelvemonth the intercourse between the two poets was +close and constant, and most fruitful in results of high moment to +English literature. It was in their daily rambles among the Quantock +Hills that they excogitated that twofold theory of the essence and +functions of poetry which was to receive such notable illustration in +their joint volume of verse, the <i>Lyrical Ballads</i>; it was during +a walk over the Quantock Hills that by far the most famous poem of that +series, the <i>Ancient Mariner</i>, was conceived and in part composed. +The publication of the <i>Lyrical Ballads</i> in the spring of the year +1798 was, indeed, an event of double significance for English poetry. +It marked an epoch in the creative life of Coleridge, and a no less +important one in the critical life of Wordsworth. In the <i>Biographia +Literaria</i> the origination of the plan of the work is thus +described: – </p> + +<p>"During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours our +conversation turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry, +the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful +adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest +of novelty by the modifying colours of the imagination. The sudden +charm which accidents of light and shade, which moonlight or sunset +diffused over a known and familiar landscape appeared to represent the +practicability of combining both. These are the poetry of nature. The +thought suggested itself (to which of us I do not recollect) that a +series of poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one the +incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural; and +the interest aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the +affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions as would naturally +accompany such situations, supposing them real.... For the second +class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life; the characters +and incidents were to be such as will be found in every village and its +vicinity where there is a meditative and feeling mind to seek after +them, or to notice them when they present themselves. In this idea +originated the plan of the <i>Lyrical Ballads</i>, in which it was +agreed that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters +supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our +inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to +procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of +disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith. Mr. +Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself, as his +object, to give the charm of novelty to things of everyday, and to +excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural by awakening the mind's +attention from the lethargy of custom and directing it to the +loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible +treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and +selfish solicitude, we have eyes which see not, ears that hear not, and +hearts which neither feel nor understand."</p> + +<p>We may measure the extent to which the poetic teaching and practice of +Wordsworth have influenced subsequent taste and criticism by noting how +completely the latter of these two functions of poetry has overshadowed +the former. To lend the charm of imagination to the real will appear to +many people to be not one function of poetry merely but its very +essence. To them it is poetry, and the only thing worthy of the name; +while the correlative function of lending the force of reality to the +imaginary will appear at best but a superior kind of metrical +romancing, or clever telling of fairy tales. Nor of course can there, +from the point of view of the highest conception of the poet's office, +be any comparison between the two. In so far as we regard poetry as +contributing not merely to the pleasure of the mind but to its health +and strength – in so far as we regard it in its capacity not only to +delight but to sustain, console, and tranquillise the human spirit – +there is, of course, as much difference between the idealistic and the +realistic forms of poetry as there is between a narcotic potion and a +healing drug. The one, at best, can only enable a man to forget his +burdens; the other fortifies him to endure them. It is perhaps no more +than was naturally to be expected of our brooding and melancholy age, +that poetry (when it is not a mere voluptuous record of the subjective +impressions of sense) should have become almost limited in its very +meaning to the exposition of the imaginative or spiritual aspect of the +world of realities; but so it is now, and so in Coleridge's time it +clearly was <i>not</i>. Coleridge, in the passage above quoted, shows +no signs of regarding one of the two functions which he attributes to +poetry as any more accidental or occasional than the other; and the +fact that the realistic portion of the <i>Lyrical Ballads</i> so far +exceeded in amount its supernatural element, he attributes not to any +inherent supremacy in the claims of the former to attention but simply +to the greater industry which Wordsworth had displayed in his special +department of the volume. For his own part, he says, "I wrote the +<i>Ancient Mariner</i>, and was preparing, among other poems, the +<i>Dark Ladie</i> and the <i>Christabel</i>, in which I should have more +nearly realised my ideal than I had done in my first attempt. But +Mr. Wordsworth's industry had proved so much more successful, and the +number of the poems so much greater, that my compositions, instead of +forming a balance, appeared rather an interpolation of heterogeneous +matter." There was certainly a considerable disparity between the +amount of their respective contributions to the volume, which, in fact, +contained nineteen pieces by Wordsworth and only four by Coleridge. +Practically, indeed, we may reduce this four to one; for, of the three +others, the two scenes from <i>Osorio</i> are without special distinction, +and the <i>Nightingale</i>, though a graceful poem, and containing +an admirably-studied description of the bird's note, is too +slight and short to claim any importance in the series. But the one +long poem which Coleridge contributed to the collection is alone +sufficient to associate it for ever with his name. <i>Unum sed +leonem.</i> To any one who should have taunted him with the comparative +infertility of his Muse he might well have returned the haughty answer +of the lioness in the fable, when he could point in justification of it +to the <i>Rime of the Ancient Marinere</i>.</p> + +<p>There is, I may assume, no need at the present day to discuss the true +place in English literature of this unique product of the human +imagination. One is bound, however, to attempt to correlate and adjust +it to the rest of the poet's work, and this, it must be admitted, is a +most difficult piece of business. Never was there a poem so irritating +to a critic of the "pigeon-holing" variety. It simply defies him; and +yet the instinct which he obeys is so excusable, because in fact so +universal, that one feels guilty of something like disloyalty to the +very principles of order in smiling at his disappointment. Complete and +symmetrical classification is so fascinating an amusement; it would +simplify so many subjects of study, if men and things would only +consent to rank themselves under different categories, and remain +there; it would, in particular, be so inexpressibly convenient to be +able to lay your hand upon your poet whenever you wanted him by merely +turning to a shelf labelled "Realistic" or "Imaginative" (nay, perhaps, +to the still greater saving of labour – Objective or Subjective), that +we cannot be surprised at the strength of the aforesaid instinct in +many a critical mind. Nor should it be hard to realise its revolt +against those single exceptions which bring its generalisations to +nought. When the pigeon-hole will admit every "document" but one, the +case is hard indeed; and it is not too much to say that the <i>Ancient +Mariner</i> is the one document which the pigeon-hole in this instance +declines to admit. If Coleridge had only refrained from writing this +remarkable poem, or if, having done so, he had written more poems like +it, the critic might have ticketed him with a quiet mind, and gone on +his way complacent. As it is, however, the poet has contrived in virtue +of this performance not only to defeat classification but to defy it. +For the weird ballad abounds in those very qualities in which +Coleridge's poetry with all its merits is most conspicuously deficient, +while on the other hand it is wholly free from the faults with which he +is most frequently and justly chargeable. One would not have said in +the first place that the author of <i>Religious Musings</i>, still less +of the <i>Monody on the Death of Chatterton</i>, was by any means the +man to have compassed triumphantly at the very first attempt the +terseness, vigour, and <i>naïveté</i> of the true ballad-manner. To +attain this, Coleridge, the student of his early verse must feel, would +have rather more to retrench and much more to restrain than might be +the case with many other youthful poets. The exuberance of immaturity, +the want of measure, the "not knowing where to stop," are certainly +even more conspicuous in the poems of 1796 than they are in most +productions of the same stage of poetic development; and these +qualities, it is needless to say, require very stern chastening from +him who would succeed in the style which Coleridge attempted for the +first time in the <i>Ancient Mariner</i>.</p> + +<p>The circumstances of this immortal ballad's birth have been related +with such fulness of detail by Wordsworth, and Coleridge's own +references to them are so completely reconcilable with that account, +that it must have required all De Quincey's consummate ingenuity as a +mischief-maker to detect any discrepancy between the two.</p> + +<p>In the autumn of 1797, records Wordsworth in the MS. notes which he +left behind him, "Mr. Coleridge, my sister, and myself started from +Alfoxden pretty late in the afternoon with a view to visit Linton and +the Valley of Stones near to it; and as our united funds were very +small, we agreed to defray the expense of the tour by writing a poem to +be sent to the <i>New Monthly Magazine</i>. Accordingly we set off, and +proceeded along the Quantock Hills towards Watchet; and in the course +of this walk was planned the poem of the <i>Ancient Mariner</i>, +founded on a dream, as Mr. Coleridge said, of his friend Mr. +Cruikshank. Much the greatest part of the story was Mr. Coleridge's +invention, but certain parts I suggested; for example, some crime was +to be committed which should bring upon the Old Navigator, as Coleridge +afterwards delighted to call him, the spectral persecution, as a +consequence of that crime and his own wanderings. I had been reading in +Shelvocke's <i>Voyages</i>, a day or two before, that while doubling +Cape Horn they frequently saw albatrosses in that latitude, the largest +sort of sea-fowl, some extending their wings twelve or thirteen feet. +'Suppose,' said I, 'you represent him as having killed one of these +birds on entering the South Sea, and that the tutelary spirits of these +regions take upon them to avenge the crime.' The incident was thought +fit for the purpose, and adopted accordingly. I also suggested the +navigation of the ship by the dead men, but do not recollect that I had +anything more to do with the scheme of the poem. The gloss with which +it was subsequently accompanied was not thought of by either of us at +the time, at least not a hint of it was given to me, and I have no +doubt it was a gratuitous afterthought. We began the composition +together on that to me memorable evening. I furnished two or three +lines at the beginning of the poem, in particular – </p> + +<p class="verse"> "'And listened like a three years' child:<br /> + The Mariner had his will.'</p> + +<p>"These trifling contributions, all but one, which Mr. C. has with +unnecessary scrupulosity recorded,[<a href="#foot_3-3">3</a>] slipped out of his mind, as they +well might. As we endeavoured to proceed conjointly (I speak of the +same evening) our respective manners proved so widely different that it +would have been quite presumptuous in me to do anything but separate +from an undertaking upon which I could only have been a clog.... The +<i>Ancient Mariner</i> grew and grew till it became too important for +our first object, which was limited to our expectation of five pounds; +and we began to think of a volume which was to consist, as Mr. +Coleridge has told the world, of poems chiefly on supernatural +subjects." Except that the volume ultimately determined on was to +consist only "partly" and not "chiefly" of poems on supernatural +subjects (in the result, as has been seen, it consisted "chiefly" of +poems upon natural subjects), there is nothing in this account which +cannot be easily reconciled with the probable facts upon which De +Quincey bases his hinted charge against Coleridge in his <i>Lake +Poets</i>. It was not Coleridge who had been reading Shelvocke's +<i>Voyages</i>, but Wordsworth, and it is quite conceivable, therefore, +that the source from which his friend had derived the idea of the +killing of the albatross may (if indeed he was informed of it at the +time) have escaped his memory twelve years afterwards, when the +conversation with De Quincey took place. Hence, in "disowning his +obligations to Shelvocke," he may not by any means have intended to +suggest that the albatross incident was his own thought. Moreover, De +Quincey himself supplies another explanation of the matter, which we +know, from the above-quoted notes of Wordsworth's, to be founded upon +fact. "It is possible," he adds, "from something which Coleridge said +on another occasion, that before meeting a fable in which to embody his +ideas he had meditated a poem on delirium, confounding its own dream-scenery with external things, and connected with the imagery of high +latitudes." Nothing, in fact, would be more natural than that +Coleridge, whose idea of the haunted seafarer was primarily suggested +by his friend's dream, and had no doubt been greatly elaborated in his +own imagination before being communicated to Wordsworth at all, should +have been unable, after a considerable lapse of time, to distinguish +between incidents of his own imagining and those suggested to him by +others. And, in any case, the "unnecessary scrupulosity," rightly +attributed to him by Wordsworth with respect to this very poem, is +quite incompatible with any intentional denial of obligations.</p> + +<p>Such, then, was the singular and even prosaic origin of the <i>Ancient +Mariner</i> – a poem written to defray the expenses of a tour; surely +the most sublime of "pot-boilers" to be found in all literature. It is +difficult, from amid the astonishing combination of the elements of +power, to select that which is the most admirable; but, considering +both the character of the story and of its particular vehicle, perhaps +the greatest achievement of the poem is the simple realistic force of +its narrative. To achieve this was of course Coleridge's main object: +he had undertaken to "transfer from our inward nature a human interest +and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of +imaginations that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which +constitutes poetic faith." But it is easier to undertake this than to +perform it, and much easier to perform it in prose than in verse – with +the assistance of the everyday and the commonplace than without it. +Balzac's <i>Peau de Chagrin</i> is no doubt a great feat of the +realistic-supernatural; but no one can help feeling how much the author +is aided by his "broker's clerk" style of description, and by the +familiar Parisian scenes among which he makes his hero move. It is +easier to compass verisimilitude in the Palais-Royal than on the South +Pacific, to say nothing of the thousand assisting touches, out of place +in rhyme and metre, which can be thrown into a prose narrative. The +<i>Ancient Mariner</i>, however, in spite of all these drawbacks, is as +real to the reader as is the hero of the <i>Peau de Chagrin</i>; we are +as convinced of the curse upon one of the doomed wretches as upon the +other; and the strange phantasmagoric haze which is thrown around the +ship and the lonely voyager leaves their outlines as clear as if we saw +them through the sunshine of the streets of Paris. Coleridge triumphs +over his difficulties by sheer vividness of imagery and terse vigour of +descriptive phrase – two qualities for which his previous poems did not +prove him to possess by any means so complete a mastery. For among all +the beauties of his earlier landscapes we can hardly reckon that of +intense and convincing truth. He seems seldom before to have written, +as Wordsworth nearly always seems to write, "with his eye on the +object;" and certainly he never before displayed any remarkable power +of completing his word-picture with a few touches. In the <i>Ancient +Mariner</i> his eye seems never to wander from his object, and again +and again the scene starts out upon the canvas in two or three strokes +of the brush. The skeleton ship, with the dicing demons on its deck; +the setting sun peering "through its ribs, as if through a dungeon-grate;" the water-snakes under the moonbeams, with the "elfish light" +falling off them "in hoary flakes" when they reared; the dead crew, who +work the ship and "raise their limbs like lifeless tools" – everything +seems to have been actually <i>seen</i>, and we believe it all as the +story of a truthful eye-witness. The details of the voyage, too, are +all chronicled with such order and regularity, there is such a diary-like air about the whole thing, that we accept it almost as if it were +a series of extracts from the ship's "log." Then again the execution – a +great thing to be said of so long a poem – is marvellously equal +throughout; the story never drags or flags for a moment, its felicities +of diction are perpetual, and it is scarcely marred by a single weak +line. What could have been better said of the instantaneous descent of +the tropical night than</p> + +<p class="verse"> "The Sun's rim dips; the stars rush out:<br /> + At one stride comes the dark;"</p> + +<p>what more weirdly imagined of the "cracks and growls" of the rending +iceberg than that they sounded "like noises in a swound"? And how +beautifully steals in the passage that follows upon the cessation of +the spirit's song – </p> + +<p class="verse"> "It ceased; yet still the sails made on<br /> + A pleasant noise till noon,<br /> + A noise like to a hidden brook<br /> + In the leafy month of June,<br /> + That to the sleeping woods all night<br /> + Singeth a quiet tune."</p> + +<p>Then, as the ballad draws to its close, after the ship has +drifted over the harbour-bar – </p> + +<p class="verse"> "And I with sobs did pray –<br /> + O let me be awake, my God;<br /> + Or let me sleep alway,"</p> + +<p>with what consummate art are we left to imagine the physical traces +which the mariner's long agony had left behind it by a method far more +terrible than any direct description – the effect, namely, which the +sight of him produces upon others – </p> + +<p class="verse"> "I moved my lips – the Pilot shrieked<br /> + And fell down in a fit; + The holy Hermit raised his eyes, + And prayed where he did sit.</p> + +<p> "I took the oars: the Pilot's boy, + <i>Who now doth crazy go</i>, + Laughed loud and long, and all the while + His eyes went to and fro. + 'Ha! ha!' quoth he, 'full plain I see, + The Devil knows how to row.'"</p> + +<p>Perfect consistency of plan, in short, and complete equality of +execution, brevity, self-restraint, and an unerring sense of artistic +propriety – these are the chief notes of the <i>Ancient Mariner</i>, as +they are <i>not</i>, in my humble judgment, the chief notes of any poem +of Coleridge's before or since. And hence it is that this masterpiece +of ballad minstrelsy is, as has been said, so confounding to the +"pigeon-holing" mind.</p> + +<p>The next most famous poem of this or indeed of any period of Coleridge's +life is the fragment of <i>Christabel</i>, which, however, in spite of +the poet's own opinion on that point, it is difficult to regard as "a +more effective realisation" of the "natural-supernatural" idea. Beautiful +as it is, it possesses none of that human interest with which, according +to this idea, the narrator of the poetic story must undertake to invest +it. Nor can the unfinished condition in which it was left be fairly held +to account for this, for the characters themselves – the lady Christabel, +the witch Geraldine, and even the baron Sir Leoline himself – are somewhat +shadowy creations, with too little hold upon life and reality, and too +much resemblance to the flitting figures of a dream. Powerful in their +way as are the lines descriptive of the spell thrown over Christabel by +her uncanny guest – lines at the recitation of which Shelley is said to +have fainted – we cannot say that they strike a reader with such a sense of +horror as should be excited by the contemplation of a real flesh-and-blood +maiden subdued by "the shrunken serpent eyes" of a sorceress, and +constrained "passively to imitate" their "look of dull and treacherous +hate." Judging it, however, by any other standard than that of the poet's +own erecting, one must certainly admit the claim of <i>Christabel</i> to +rank very high as a work of pure creative art. It is so thoroughly +suffused and permeated with the glow of mystical romance, the whole +atmosphere of the poem is so exquisitely appropriate to the subject, +and so marvellously preserved throughout, that our lack of belief in +the reality of the scenes presented to us detracts but little from the +pleasure afforded by the artistic excellence of its presentment. It +abounds, too, in isolated pictures of surpassing vividness and grace – +word-pictures which live in the "memory of the eye" with all the +wholeness and tenacity of an actual painting. Geraldine appearing to +Christabel beneath the oak, and the two women stepping lightly across +the hall "that echoes still, pass as lightly as you will," are pictures +of this kind; and nowhere out of Keats's <i>Eve of St. Agnes</i> is +there any "interior" to match that of Christabel's chamber, done as it +is in little more than half a dozen lines. These beauties, it is true, +are fragmentary, like the poem itself, but there is no reason to +believe that the poem itself would have gained anything in its +entirety – that is to say, as a poetic narrative – by completion. Its +main idea – that the purity of a pure maiden is a charm more powerful +for the protection of those dear to her than the spells of the evil one +for their destruction – had been already sufficiently indicated, and the +mode in which Coleridge, it seems, intended to have worked would hardly +have added anything to its effect. [<a href="#foot_3-4">4</a>] And although he clung till very +late in life to the belief that he <i>could</i> have finished it in +after days with no change of poetic manner – "If easy in my mind," he +says in a letter to be quoted hereafter, "I have no doubt either of the +reawakening power or of the kindling inclination" – there are few +students of his later poems who will share his confidence. Charles Lamb +strongly recommended him to leave it unfinished, and Hartley Coleridge, +in every respect as competent a judge on that point as could well be +found, always declared his conviction that his father could not, at +least <i>qualis ab incepto</i>, have finished the poem.</p> + +<p>The much-admired little piece first published in the <i>Lyrical Ballads</i> +under the title of <i>Love</i>, and probably best known by its +(original) first and most pregnant stanza, [<a href="#foot_3-5">5</a>] possesses a twofold +interest for the student of Coleridge's life and works, as illustrating +at once one of the most marked characteristics of his peculiar +temperament, and one of the most distinctive features of his poetic +manner. The lines are remarkable for a certain strange fascination of +melody – a quality for which Coleridge, who was not unreasonably proud +of his musical gift, is said to have especially prized them; and they +are noteworthy also as perhaps the fullest expression of the almost +womanly softness of Coleridge's nature. To describe their tone as +effeminate would be unfair and untrue, for effeminacy in the work of a +male hand would necessarily imply something of falsity of sentiment, +and from this they are entirely free. But it must certainly be admitted +that for a man's description of his wooing the warmth of feeling which +pervades them is as nearly sexless in character as it is possible to +conceive; and, beautiful as the verses are, one cannot but feel that +they only escape the "namby-pamby" by the breadth of a hair.</p> + +<p>As to the wild dream-poem <i>Kubla Khan</i>, it is hardly more than a +psychological curiosity, and only that perhaps in respect of the +completeness of its metrical form. For amid its picturesque but vague +imagery there is nothing which might not have presented itself, and the +like of which has not perhaps actually presented itself, to many a +half-awakened brain of far lower imaginative energy during its hours of +full daylight consciousness than that of Coleridge. Nor possibly is it +quite an unknown experience to many of us to have even a fully-written +record, so to speak, of such impressions imprinted instantaneously on +the mind, the conscious composition of whole pages of narrative, +descriptive, or cogitative matter being compressed as it were into a +moment of time. Unfortunately, however, the impression made upon the +ordinary brain is effaced as instantaneously as it is produced; the +abnormal exaltation of the creative and apprehensive power is quite +momentary, being probably indeed confined to the single moment between +sleep and waking; and the mental tablet which a second before was +covered so thickly with the transcripts of ideas and images, all far +more vivid, or imagined to be so, than those of waking life, and all +apprehended with a miraculous simultaneity by the mind, is converted +into a <i>tabula rasa</i> in the twinkling of a half-opened eye. The wonder in +Coleridge's case was that his brain retained the word-impressions +sufficiently long to enable him to commit them, to the extent at least +of some fifty odd lines, to paper, and that, according to his own +belief, this is but a mere fraction of what but for an unlucky +interruption in the work of transcribing he would have been able to +preserve. His own account of this curious incident is as follows: –</p> + +<p>"In the summer of 1797 the author, then in ill health, had retired to a +lonely farmhouse between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of +Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an +anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep +in his chair at the moment that he was reading, the following sentence, +or words of the same substance, in Purchas's <i>Pilgrimage</i>: – 'Here +the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden +thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were enclosed by a +wall.' The Author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, +at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most +vivid confidence that he could not have composed less than from two to +three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which +all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production +of the corresponding expressions, without any sensation or +consciousness of effect. On awaking he appeared to himself to have a +distinct recollection of the whole, and, taking his pen, ink, and +paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here +preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person +on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his +return to his room found, to his no small surprise and mortification, +that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the +general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or +ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the +images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, +but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter."</p> + +<p>This poem, though written in 1797, remained, like <i>Christabel</i>, in +MS. till 1816. These were then published in a thin quarto volume, together +with another piece called the <i>Pains of Sleep</i>, a composition of many +years' later date than the other two, and of which there will be +occasion to say a word or two hereafter.</p> + +<p>At no time, however, not even in this the high-tide of its activity, +was the purely poetic impulse dominant for long together in +Coleridge's mind. He was born with the instincts of the orator, and +still more with those of the teacher, and I doubt whether he ever +really regarded himself as fulfilling the true mission of his life +except at those moments when he was seeking by spoken word to exercise +direct influence over his fellow-men. At the same time, however, such +was the restlessness of his intellect, and such his instability of +purpose, that he could no more remain constant to what he deemed his +true vocation than he could to any other. This was now to be signally +illustrated. Soon after the <i>Ancient Mariner</i> was written, and +some time before the volume which was to contain it appeared, Coleridge +quitted Stowey for Shrewsbury to undertake the duties of a Unitarian +preacher in that town. This was in the month of January 1798, [<a href="#foot_3-6">6</a>] and +it seems pretty certain, though exact dates are not to be ascertained, +that he was back again at Stowey early in the month of February. In the +pages of the <i>Liberal</i> (1822) William Hazlitt has given a most +graphic and picturesque description of Coleridge's appearance and +performance in his Shrewsbury pulpit; and, judging from this, one can +well believe, what indeed was to have been antecedently expected, that +had he chosen to remain faithful to his new employment he might have +rivalled the reputation of the greatest preacher of the time. But his +friends the Wedgwoods, the two sons of the great potter, whose +acquaintance he had made a few years earlier, were apparently much +dismayed at the prospect of his deserting the library for the chapel, +and they offered him an annuity of £150 a year on condition of his +retiring from the ministry and devoting himself entirely to the study +of poetry and philosophy. Coleridge was staying at the house of +Hazlitt's father when the letter containing this liberal offer reached +him, "and he seemed," says the younger Hazlitt, "to make up his mind to +close with the proposal in the act of tying on one of his shoes." +Another inducement to so speedy an acceptance of it is no doubt to be +found in the fact of its presenting to Coleridge an opportunity for the +fulfilment of a cherished desire – that, namely, of "completing his +education," as he regarded it, by studying the German language, and +acquiring an acquaintance with the theology and philosophy of Germany +in that country itself. This prospect he was enabled, through the +generosity of the Wedgwoods, to put into execution towards the end of +1798. But before passing on from this culminating and, to all intents +and purposes, this closing year of Coleridge's career as a poet it will +be proper to attempt something like a final review of his poetic work. +Admirable as much of that work is, and unique in quality as it is +throughout, I must confess that it leaves on my own mind a stronger +impression of the unequal and imperfect than does that of any poet at +all approaching Coleridge in imaginative vigour and intellectual grasp. +It is not a mere inequality and imperfection of style like that which +so seriously detracts from the pleasure of reading Byron. Nor is it +that the thought is often <i>impar sibi</i> – that, like Wordsworth's, +it is too apt to descend from the mountain-tops of poetry to the flats +of commonplace, if not into the bogs of bathos. In both these respects +Coleridge may and does occasionally offend, but his workmanship is, on +the whole, as much more artistic than Byron's as the material of his +poetry is of more uniformly equal value than Wordsworth's. Yet, with +almost the sole exception of the <i>Ancient Mariner</i>, his work is in +a certain sense more disappointing than that of either. In spite of his +theory as to the twofold function of poetry we must finally judge that +of Coleridge, as of any other poet, by its relation to the actual. +Ancient Mariners and Christabels – the people, the scenery, and the +incidents of an imaginary world – may be handled by poetry once and +again to the wonder and delight of man; but feats of this kind cannot – +or cannot in the Western world, at any rate – be repeated indefinitely, +and the ultimate test of poetry, at least for the modern European +reader, is its treatment of actualities – its relations to the world of +human action, passion, sensation, thought. And when we try Coleridge's +poetry in any one of these four regions of life, we seem forced to +admit that, despite all its power and beauty, it at no moment succeeds +in convincing us, as at their best moments Wordsworth's and even +Byron's continually does, that the poet has found his true poetic +vocation – that he is interpreting that aspect of life which he can +interpret better than he can any other, and which no other poet, save +the one who has vanquished all poets in their own special fields of +achievement, can interpret as well as he. In no poem of actuality does +Coleridge so victoriously show himself to be the right man at the right +work as does Wordsworth in certain moods of seership and Byron in +certain moments of passion. Of them at such moods and moments we feel +assured that they have discovered where their real strength lies, and +have put it forth to the utmost. But we never feel satisfied that +Coleridge has discovered where <i>his</i> real strength lies, and he +strikes us as feeling no more certainty on the point himself. Strong as +is his pinion, his flight seems to resemble rather that of the eaglet +than of the full-grown eagle even to the last. He continues "mewing his +mighty youth" a little too long. There is a tentativeness of manner +which seems to come from a conscious aptitude for many poetic styles +and an incapacity to determine which should be definitively adopted and +cultivated to perfection. Hence one too often returns from any +prolonged ramble through Coleridge's poetry with an unsatisfied feeling +which does not trouble us on our return from the best literary country +of Byron or Wordsworth. Byron has taken us by rough roads, and +Wordsworth led us through some desperately flat and dreary lowlands to +his favourite "bits;" but we feel that we have seen mountain and +valley, wood and river, glen and waterfall at their best. But +Coleridge's poetry leaves too much of the feeling of a walk through a +fine country on a misty day. We may have had many a peep of beautiful +scenery and occasional glimpses of the sublime; but the medium of +vision has been of variable quality, and somehow we come home with an +uneasy suspicion that we have not seen as much as we might. It is +obvious, however, even upon a cursory consideration of the matter, that +this disappointing element in Coleridge's poetry is a necessary result +of the circumstances of its production; for the period of his +productive activity (at least after attaining manhood) was too short to +enable a mind with so many intellectual distractions to ascertain its +true poetic bent, and to concentrate its energies thereupon. If he +seems always to be feeling his way towards the work which he could do +best, it is for the very good reason that this is what, from 1796 to +1800, he was continually doing as a matter of fact. The various styles +which he attempted – and for a season, in each case, with such brilliant +results – are forms of poetic expression corresponding, on the face of +them, to poetic impulses of an essentially fleeting nature. The +political or politico-religious odes were the offspring of youthful +democratic enthusiasm; the supernatural poems, so to call them for want +of a better name, had their origin in an almost equally youthful and +more than equally transitory passion for the wild and wondrous. +Political disillusion is fatal to the one impulse, and mere advance in +years extinguishes the other. Visions of Ancient Mariners and +Christabels do not revisit the mature man, and the Toryism of middle +life will hardly inspire odes to anything. + +With the extinction of these two forms of creative impulse Coleridge's +poetic activity, from causes to be considered hereafter, came almost +entirely to an end, and into what later forms it might subsequently +have developed remains therefore a matter more or less of conjecture. +Yet I think there is almost a sufficiency of <i>à priori</i> evidence +as to what that form would have been. Had the poet in him survived +until years had "brought the philosophic mind," he would doubtless have +done for the human spirit, in its purely isolated self-communings, what +Wordsworth did for it in its communion with external nature. All that +the poetry of Wordsworth is for the mind which loves to hold converse +with the world of things; this, and more perhaps than this – if more be +possible – would the poetry of Coleridge have been for the mind which +abides by preference in the world of self-originating emotion and +introspective thought. Wordsworth's primary function is to interpret +nature to man: the interpretation of man to himself is with him a +secondary process only-the response, in almost every instance, to +impressions from without. This poet can nobly brace the human heart to +fortitude; but he must first have seen the leech-gatherer on the lonely +moor. The "presence and the spirit interfused" throughout creation is +revealed to us in moving and majestic words; yet the poet requires to +have felt it "in the light of setting suns and the round ocean and the +living air" before he feels it "in the mind of man." But what +Wordsworth grants only to the reader who wanders with him in +imagination by lake and mountain, the Muse of Coleridge, had she lived, +would have bestowed upon the man who has entered into his inner chamber +and shut to the door. This, it seems to me, is the work for which +genius, temperament, and intellectual habit would alike have fitted +him. For while his feeling for internal nature was undoubtedly less +profound, less mystically penetrating than Wordsworth's, his +sensibilities in general were incomparably quicker and more subtle than +those of the friend in whom he so generously recognised a master; and +the reach of his sympathies extends to forms of human emotion, to +subjects of human interest which lay altogether outside the somewhat +narrow range of Wordsworth's.</p> + +<p>And, with so magnificent a furniture of those mental and moral +qualities which should belong to "a singer of man to men," it must not +be forgotten that his technical equipment for the work was of the most +splendidly effective kind. If a critic like Mr. Swinburne seems to +speak in exaggerated praise of Coleridge's lyrics, we can well +understand their enchantment for a master of music like himself. +Probably it was the same feeling which made Shelley describe +<i>France</i> as "the finest ode in the English language." With all, in +fact, who hold – as it is surely plausible to hold – that the first duty +of a singer is to sing, the poetry of Coleridge will always be more +likely to be classed above than below its merits, great as they are. +For, if we except some occasional lapses in his sonnets – a metrical +form in which, at his best, he is quite "out of the running" with +Wordsworth – his melody never fails him. He is a singer always, as +Wordsworth is not always, and Byron almost never. The <i>'olian +Harp</i> to which he so loved to listen does not more surely respond in +music to the breeze of heaven than does Coleridge's poetic utterance to +the wind of his inspiration. Of the dreamy fascination which Love +exercises over a listening ear I have already spoken; and there is +hardly less charm in the measure and assonances of the <i>Circassian +Love Chant. Christabel</i> again, considered solely from the metrical +point of view, is a veritable <i>tour de force</i> – the very model of a +metre for romantic legend: as which, indeed, it was imitated with +sufficient grace and spirit, but seldom with anything approaching to +Coleridge's melody, by Sir Walter Scott.</p> + +<p>Endowed therefore with so glorious a gift of song, and only not fully +master of his poetic means because of the very versatility of his +artistic power and the very variety and catholicity of his youthful +sympathies, it is unhappily but too certain that the world has lost +much by that perversity of conspiring accidents which so untimely +silenced Coleridge's muse. And the loss is the more trying to posterity +because he seems, to a not, I think, too curiously considering +criticism, to have once actually struck that very chord which would +have sounded the most movingly beneath his touch, – and to have struck +it at the very moment when the failing hand was about to quit the keys +for ever.</p> + +<p> "Ostendunt terris hunc tantum fata neque ultra + Esse sinunt."</p> + +<p>I cannot regard it as merely fantastic to believe that the +<i>Dejection</i>, that dirge of infinite pathos over the grave of +creative imagination, might, but for the fatal decree which had by that +time gone forth against Coleridge's health and happiness, have been but +the cradle-cry of a new-born poetic power, in which imagination, not +annihilated but transmigrant, would have splendidly proved its vitality +through other forms of song.</p> + +<blockquote style="font-variant: small-caps"><strong>Footnotes</strong></blockquote> + +<p><a name="foot_3-1"></a>1. Perhaps the deepest impress of the Wordsworthian influence is to be +found in the little poem <i>Frost at Midnight</i>, with its affecting +apostrophe to the sleeping infant at his side – infant destined to +develop as wayward a genius and to lead as restless and irresolute a +life as his father. Its closing lines – </p> + +<p> "Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee + Whether the summer clothe the general earth + With greenness... + ... whether the eave-drops fall, + Heard only in the trances of the blast, + Or if the secret ministry of frost + Shall hang them up in silent icicles + Quietly shining to the quiet moon" – </p> + +<p>might have flowed straight from the pen of Wordsworth himself.</p> + +<p><a name="foot_3-2"></a>2. "You had a great loss in not seeing Coleridge. He is a wonderful +man. His conversation teems with soul, mind, and spirit. Then he is so +benevolent, so good tempered and cheerful, and, like William, interests +himself so much about every little trifle. At first I thought him very +plain, that is, for about three minutes; he is pale, thin, has a wide +mouth, thick lips, and not very good teeth, longish loose-growing half-curling rough black hair. But if you hear him speak for five minutes +you think no more of them. His eye is large and full, and not very dark +but gray, such an eye as would receive from a heavy soul the dullest +expression; but it speaks every emotion of his animated mind: it has +more of the poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling than I ever witnessed. +He has fine dark eyebrows and an overhanging forehead."</p> + +<p><a name="foot_3-3"></a>3. The lines – </p> + +<p> "And it is long, and lank, and brown, + As is the ribbed sea-sand."</p> + +<p><a name="foot_3-4"></a>4. Mr. Gillman (in his <i>Life</i>, p. 301) gives the following +somewhat bald outline of what were to form the two concluding cantos, +no doubt on the authority of Coleridge himself. The second canto ends, +it may be remembered, with the despatch of Bracy the bard to the castle +of Sir Roland: – "Over the mountains the Bard, as directed by Sir +Leoline, hastes with his disciple; but, in consequence of one of those +inundations supposed to be common to the country, the spot only where +the castle once stood is discovered, the edifice itself being washed +away. He determines to return. Geraldine, being acquainted with all +that is passing, like the weird sisters in <i>Macbeth</i>, vanishes. +Reappearing, however, she awaits the return of the Bard, exciting in +the meantime by her wily arts all the anger she could rouse in the +Baron's breast, as well as that jealousy of which he is described to +have been susceptible. The old bard and the youth at length arrive, and +therefore she can no longer personate the character of Geraldine, the +daughter of Lord Roland de Vaux, but changes her appearance to that of +the accepted though absent lover of Christabel. Next ensues a courtship +most distressing to Christabel, who feels – she knows not why – great +disgust for her once favoured knight. This coldness is very painful to +the Baron, who has no more conception than herself of the supernatural +transformation. She at last yields to her father's entreaties, and +consents to approach the altar with the hated suitor. The real lover +returning, enters at this moment, and produces the ring which she had +once given him in sign of her betrothment. Thus defeated, the +supernatural being Geraldine disappears. As predicted, the castle-bell +tolls, the mother's voice is heard, and, to the exceeding great joy of +the parties, the rightful marriage takes place, after which follows a +reconciliation and explanation between father and daughter."</p> + +<p><a name="foot_3-5"></a>5.</p> + +<p> "All thoughts, all passions, all delights, + Whatever stirs this mortal frame, + All are but ministers of Love, + And feed his sacred flame."</p> + +<p><a name="foot_3-6"></a>6. It may be suggested that this sudden resolution was forced upon +Coleridge by the <i>res angusta domi</i>. But I do not think that was +the case. In the winter of 1797 he had obtained an introduction to and +entered into a literary engagement with Mr. Stuart of the <i>Morning +Post</i>, and could thus have met, as in fact he afterwards did meet, +the necessities of the hour.</p> + + + +<a name="chap4"></a> +<h2>Chapter IV</h2> + +<blockquote>Visit to Germany – Life at Göttingen, – Return – Explores the Lake Country – +London – The <i>Morning Post</i> – Coleridge as a journalist – Retirement to +Keswick. </blockquote> + +<p style="text-align: center">[1799-1800.]</p> + +<p>The departure of the two poets for the Continent was delayed only till +they had seen their joint volume through the press. The <i>Lyrical +Ballads</i> appeared in the autumn of 1798, and on 16th September of +that year Coleridge left Yarmouth for Hamburg with Wordsworth and his +sister. [<a href="#foot_4-1">1</a>] The purpose of his two companions' tour is not known to +have been other than the pleasure, or mixed pleasure and instruction, +usually derivable from foreign travel; that of Coleridge was strictly, +even sternly, educational. Immediately on his arrival in Germany he +parted from the Wordsworths, who went on to Gozlar, [<a href="#foot_4-2">2</a>] and took up his +abode at the house of the pastor at Ratzeburg, with whom he spent five +months in assiduous study of the language. In January he removed to +Göttingen. Of his life here during the next few months we possess an +interesting record in the <i>Early Years and Late Reflections</i> of +Dr. Carrlyon, a book published many years after the events which it +relates, but which is quite obviously a true reflection of impressions +yet fresh in the mind of its writer when its materials were first +collected. Its principal value, in fact, is that it gives us Coleridge +from the standpoint of the average young educated Englishman of the +day, sufficiently intelligent, indeed, to be sensible of his fellow-student's transcendent abilities, but as little awed by them out of +youth's healthy irreverence of criticism as the ordinary English +undergraduate ever has been by the intellectual supremacy of any +"greatest man of his day" who might chance to have been his +contemporary at Oxford or Cambridge. In Dr. Carrlyon's reminiscences +and in the quoted letters of a certain young Parry, another of the +English student colony at Göttingen, we get a piquant picture of the +poet-philosopher of seven-and-twenty, with his yet buoyant belief in +his future, his still unquenched interest in the world of things, and +his never-to-be-quenched interest in the world of thought, his even +then inexhaustible flow of disquisition, his generous admiration for +the gifts of others, and his <i>naïve</i> complacency – including, it +would seem, a touch of the vanity of personal appearance – in his own. +"He frequently," writes Dr. Carrlyon, "recited his own poetry, and not +unfrequently led us further into the labyrinth of his metaphysical +elucidations, either of particular passages or of the original +conception of any of his productions, than we were able to follow him. +At the conclusion, for instance, of the first stanza of +<i>Christabel</i>, he would perhaps comment at full length upon such a +line as 'Tu – whit! – Tu – whoo!' that we might not fall into the mistake +of supposing originality to be its sole merit." The example is not very +happily chosen, for Coleridge could hardly have claimed "originality" +for an onomatopoeia which occurs in one of Shakspeare's best known +lyrics; but it serves well enough to illustrate the fact that he "very +seldom went right to the end of any piece of poetry; to pause and +analyse was his delight." His disappointment with regard to his tragedy +of <i>Osorio</i> was, we also learn, still fresh. He seldom, we are +told, "recited any of the beautiful passages with which it abounds +without a visible interruption of the perfect composure of his mind." +He mentioned with great emotion Sheridan's inexcusable treatment of him +with respect to it. At the same time, adds his friend, "he is a severe +critic of his own productions, and declares" (this no doubt with +reference to his then, and indeed his constant estimate of +<i>Christabel</i> as his masterpiece) "that his best poems have perhaps +not appeared in print."</p> + +<p>Young Parry's account of his fellow-student is also fresh and pleasing. +"It is very delightful," he tells a correspondent, "to hear him sometimes +discourse on religious topics for an hour together. His fervour is +particularly agreeable when compared with the chilling speculations of +German philosophers," whom Coleridge, he adds, "successively forced to +abandon all their strongholds." He is "much liked, notwithstanding many +peculiarities. He is very liberal towards all doctrines and opinions, +and cannot be put out of temper. These circumstances give him the +advantage of his opponents, who are always bigoted and often irascible. +Coleridge is an enthusiast on many subjects, and must therefore appear +to many to possess faults, and no doubt he has faults, but he has a +good heart and a large mass of information with," as his fellow-student +condescendingly admits, "superior talents. The great fault which his +friends may lament is the variety of subjects which he adopts, and the +abstruse nature of his ordinary speculations, <i>extra homines podtas</i>. +They can easily," concludes the writer, rising here to the full +stateliness of youth's epistolary style, "they can easily excuse his +devoted attachment to his country, and his reasoning as to the means of +producing the greatest human happiness, but they do not universally +approve the mysticism of his metaphysics and the remoteness of his +topics from human comprehension."</p> + +<p>In the month of May 1799 Coleridge set out with a party of his fellow-students on a walking tour through the Harz Mountains, an excursion +productive of much oral philosophising on his part, and of the +composition of the <i>Lines on ascending the Brocken</i>, not one of the +happiest efforts of his muse. As to the philosophising, "he never," says +one of his companions on this trip, "appeared to tire of mental exercise; +talk seemed to him a perennial pastime, and his endeavours to inform and +amuse us ended only with the cravings of hunger or the fatigue of a long +march, from which neither his conversational powers nor his stoicism +could protect himself or us." It speaks highly for the matter of +Coleridge's allocutions that such incessant outpourings during a +mountaineering tramp appear to have left no lasting impression of +boredom behind them. The holiday seems to have been thoroughly enjoyed +by the whole party, and Coleridge, at any rate, had certainly earned +it. For once, and it is almost to be feared for the last time in his +life, he had resisted his besetting tendency to dispersiveness, and +constrained his intelligence to apply itself to one thing at a time. +He had come to Germany to acquire the language, and to learn what of +German theology and metaphysics he might find worth the study, and his +five months' steady pursuit of the former object had been followed by +another four months of resolute prosecution of the latter. He attended +the lectures of Professor Blumenbach, and obtained through a fellow-student notes from those of Eichhorn. He suffered no interruption in +his studies, unless we are to except a short visit from Wordsworth +and his sister, who had spent most of their stay abroad in residence +at Gozlar; and he appears, in short, to have made in every way the best +use of his time. On 24th June 1799 he gave his leave-taking supper at +Göttingen, replying to the toast of his health in fluent German but +with an execrable accent; and the next day presumably he started on his +homeward journey.</p> + +<p>His movements for the next few months are incorrectly stated in most of +the brief memoirs prefixed to the various editions of the poet's works, + – their writers having, it is to be imagined, accepted without +examination a misplaced date of Mr. Gillman's. It is not the fact that +Coleridge "returned to England after an absence of fourteen months, and +arrived in London the 27th of November." His absence could not have +lasted longer than a year, for we know from the evidence of Miss +Wordsworth's diary that he was exploring the Lake country (very likely +for the first time) in company with her brother and herself in the month +of September 1799. The probability is that he arrived in England early +in July, and immediately thereupon did the most natural and proper thing +to be done under the circumstances – namely, returned to his wife and +children at Nether Stowey, and remained there for the next two months, +after which he set off with the Wordsworths, then still at Alfoxden, to +visit the district to which the latter had either already resolved upon, +or were then contemplating, the transfer of their abode. The 27th of +November is no doubt the correct date of his arrival in London, though not +"from abroad." And his first six weeks in the metropolis were spent in a +very characteristic fashion – in the preparation, namely, of a work which +he pronounced with perfect accuracy to be destined to fall dead from the +press. He shut himself up in a lodging in Buckingham Street, Strand, +and by the end of the above-mentioned period he had completed his +admirable translation of <i>Wallenstein</i>, in itself a perfect, and +indeed his most perfect dramatic poem. The manuscript of this English +version of Schiller's drama was purchased by Messrs. Longman under the +condition that the translation and the original should appear at the +same time. Very few copies were sold, and the publishers, indifferent +to Coleridge's advice to retain the unsold copies until the book should +become fashionable, disposed of them as waste paper. Sixteen years +afterwards, on the publication of <i>Christabel</i>, they were eagerly +sought for, and the few remaining copies doubled their price. It was +while engaged upon this work that he formed that connection with +political jouralism which lasted, though with intermissions, throughout +most of the remainder of his life. His early poetical pieces had, as we +have seen, made their first appearance in the <i>Morning Post</i>, but +hitherto that newspaper had received no prose contribution from his +pen. His engagement with its proprietor, Mr. Daniel Stuart, to whom he +had been introduced during a visit to London in 1797, was to contribute +an occasional copy of verses for a stipulated annual sum; and some +dozen or so of his poems (notably among them the ode to <i>France</i> +and the two strange pieces <i>Fire Famine and Slaughter</i> and <i>The +Devil's Thoughts</i>) had entered the world in this way during the +years 1798 and 1799.</p> + +<p>Misled by the error above corrected, the writers of some of the brief +memoirs of Coleridge's life represent him as having sent verse +contributions to the <i>Morning Post</i> from Germany in 1799; but as +the earliest of these only appeared in August of that year there is no +reason to suppose that any of them were written before his return to +England. The longest of the serious pieces is the well-known <i>Ode to +Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire</i>, which cannot be regarded as one +of the happiest of Coleridge's productions. Its motive is certainly a +little slight, and its sentiment more than a little overstrained. The +noble enthusiasm of the noble lady who, "though nursed in pomp and +pleasure," could yet condescend to "hail the platform wild where once +the Austrian fell beneath the shaft of Tell," hardly strikes a reader +of the present day as remarkable enough to be worth "gushing" over; and +when the poet goes on to suggest as the explanation of Georgiana's +having "learned that heroic measure" that the Whig great lady had +suckled her own children, we certainly seem to have taken the fatal +step beyond the sublime! It is to be presumed that Tory great ladies +invariably employed the services of a wet-nurse, and hence failed to +win the same tribute from the angel of the earth, who, usually, while +he guides</p> + +<p> "His chariot-planet round the goal of day, + All trembling gazes on the eye of God,"</p> + +<p>but who on this occasion "a moment turned his awful face away" to gaze +approvingly on the high-born mother who had so conscientiously +performed her maternal duties.</p> + +<p>Very different is the tone of this poem from that of the two best known +of Coleridge's lighter contributions to the <i>Morning Post</i>. The +most successful of these, however, from the journalistic point of view, +is in a literary sense the less remarkable. One is indeed a little +astonished to find that a public, accustomed to such admirable political +satire as the <i>Anti-Jacobin</i>, should have been so much taken as it +seems to have been by the rough versification and somewhat clumsy sarcasm +of the <i>Devil's Thoughts</i>. The poem created something like a +<i>furore</i>, and sold a large reissue of the number of the <i>Morning +Post</i> in which it appeared. Nevertheless it is from the metrical point +of view doggerel, as indeed the author admits, three of its most smoothly-flowing stanzas being from the hand of Southey, while there is nothing in +its boisterous political drollery to put its composition beyond the reach +of any man of strong partisan feelings and a turn for street-humour. +<i>Fire Famine and Slaughter</i>, on the other hand, is literary in +every sense of the word, requiring indeed, and very urgently, to insist +on its character as literature, in order to justify itself against the +charge of inhuman malignity. Despite the fact that "letters four do +form his name," it is of course an idealised statesman, and not the +real flesh and blood Mr. Pitt, whom the sister furies, Fire, Famine, +and Slaughter, extol as their patron in these terrible lines. The poem +must be treated as what lawyers call an "A. B. case." Coleridge must be +supposed to be lashing certain alphabetical symbols arranged in a +certain order. This idealising process is perfectly easy and familiar +to everybody with the literary sense. The deduction for "poetic +license" is just as readily, though it does not, of course, require to +be as frequently, made with respect to the hyperbole of denunciation as +with respect to that of praise. Nor need we doubt that this deduction +had in fact been made by all intelligent readers long before that +agitating dinner at Mr. Sotheby's, which Coleridge describes with such +anxious gravity in his apologetic preface to the republication of the +lines. On the whole one may pretty safely accept De Quincey's view of +the true character of this incident as related by him in his own +inimitable fashion, namely, that it was in the nature of an elaborate +hoax, played off at the poet's expense. [<a href="#foot_4-3">3</a>] The malice of the piece is, +as De Quincey puts it, quite obviously a "malice of the understanding +and fancy," and not of the heart. There is significance in the mere +fact that the poem was deliberately published by Coleridge two years +after its composition, when the vehemence of his political animosities +had much abated. Written in 1796, it did not appear in the <i>Morning +Post</i> till January 1798.</p> + +<p>He was now, however, about to draw closer his connection with the +newspaper press. Soon after his return from Germany he was solicited +to "undertake the literary and political department in the <i>Morning +Post</i>," and acceded to the proposal "on condition that the paper +should thenceforward be conducted on certain fixed and announced +principles, and that he should be neither obliged nor requested to +deviate from them in favour of any party or any event." Accordingly, +from December 1799 until about midsummer of 1800, Coleridge became a +regular contributor of political articles to this journal, sometimes +to the number of two or three in one week. At the end of the period +of six months he quitted London, and his contributions became +necessarily less frequent, but they were continued (though with two +apparent breaks of many months in duration) [<a href="#foot_4-4">4</a>] until the close of +the year 1802. It would seem, however, that nothing but Coleridge's +own disinclination prevented this connection from taking a +form in which it would have profoundly modified his whole future +career. In a letter to Mr. Poole, dated March 1800, he informs his +friend that if he "had the least love of money" he could "make sure of +£2000 a year, for that Stuart had offered him half shares in his two +papers, the <i>Morning Post</i> and the <i>Courier</i>, if he would devote +himself to them in conjunction with their proprietor. But I told +him," he continues, "that I would not give up the country and the lazy +reading of old folios for two thousand times two thousand pounds, – in +short, that beyond £350 a year I considered money as a real evil." +Startlingly liberal as this offer will appear to the journalist, it +seems really to have been made. For, writing long afterwards to Mr. +Nelson Coleridge, Mr. Stuart says: "Could Coleridge and I place +ourselves thirty years back, and he be so far a man of business as to +write three or four hours a day, there is nothing I would not pay for +his assistance. I would take him into partnership, and I would enable +him to make a large fortune." Nor is there any reason to think that the +bargain would have been a bad one for the proprietor from the strictly +commercial point of view. Coleridge in later years may no doubt have +overrated the effect of his own contributions on the circulation of the +<i>Morning Post</i>, but it must have been beyond question considerable, +and would in all likelihood have become far greater if he could have +been induced to devote himself more closely to the work of journalism. +For the fact is – and it is a fact for which the current conception of +Coleridge's intellectual character does not altogether prepare one – that +he was a workman of the very first order of excellence in this curious +craft. The faculties which go to the attainment of such excellence are +not perhaps among the highest distinctions of the human mind, but, such +as they are, they are specific and well marked; they are by no means the +necessary accompaniments even of the most conspicuous literary power, +and they are likely rather to suffer than to profit by association with +great subtlety of intellect or wide philosophic grasp. It is not to the +advantage of the journalist, as such, that he should see too many +things at a time, or too far into any one thing, and even the gifts of +an active imagination and an abundant vocabulary are each of them +likely to prove a snare. To be wholly successful, the journalist – at +least the English journalist – must not be too eloquent, or too witty, +or too humorous, or too ingenious, or too profound. Yet the English +reader likes, or thinks he likes, eloquence; he has a keen sense of +humour, and a fair appreciation of wit; and he would be much hurt if he +were told that ingenuity and profundity were in themselves distasteful +to him. How, then, to give him enough of these qualities to please and +not enough to offend him – as much eloquence as will stir his emotions, +but not enough to arouse his distrust; as much wit as will carry home +the argument, but not enough to make him doubt its sincerity; as much +humour as will escape the charge of levity, as much ingenuity as can be +displayed without incurring suspicion, and as much profundity as may +impress without bewildering? This is a problem which is fortunately +simplified for most journalists by the fact of their possessing these +qualities in no more than, if in so much as, the minimum required. But +Coleridge, it must be remembered, possessed most of them in +embarrassing superfluity. Not all of them indeed, for, though he could +be witty and at times humorous, his temptations to excess in these +respects were doubtless not considerable. But as for his eloquence, he +was from his youth upwards <i>Isoo torrentior</i>, his dialectical +ingenuity was unequalled, and in disquisition of the speculative order +no man was so apt as he to penetrate more deeply into his subject than +most of his readers would care to follow him. <i>À priori</i>, +therefore, one would have expected that Coleridge's instincts would +have led him to rhetorise too much in his diction, to refine too much +in his arguments, and to philosophise too much in his reflections, to +have hit the popular taste as a journalist, and that at the age of +eight-and-twenty he would have been unable to subject these tendencies +either to the artistic repression of the maturer writer or to the +tactical restraints of the trained advocate. This eminently natural +assumption, however, is entirely rebutted by the facts. Nothing is more +remarkable in Coleridge's contributions to the <i>Morning Post</i> than +their thoroughly workmanlike character from the journalistic point of +view, their avoidance of "viewiness," their strict adherence to the one +or two simple points which he is endeavouring at any particular +juncture in politics to enforce upon his readers, and the steadiness +with which he keeps his own and his readers' attention fixed on the +special political necessities of the hour. His articles, in short, +belong to that valuable class to which, while it gives pleasure to the +cultivated reader, the most commonplace and Philistine man of business +cannot refuse the to him supreme praise of being eminently "practical." +They hit the nail on the head in nearly every case, and they take the +plainest and most direct route to their point, dealing in rhetoric and +metaphor only so far as the strictly "business" ends of the argument +appear to require. Nothing, for instance, could have been better done, +better reasoned and written, more skilfully adapted throughout to the +English taste, than Coleridge's criticism (3lst Dec. 1799) on the new +constitution established by Bonaparte and Sieyes on the foundation of +the Consulate, with its eighty senators, the "creatures of a renegade +priest, himself the creature of a foreign mercenary, its hundred +tribunes who are to talk and do nothing, and its three hundred +legislators whom the constitution orders to be silent." What a +ludicrous Purgatory, adds he, "for three hundred Frenchmen!" Very +vigorous, moreover, is he on the ministerial rejection of the French +proposals of peace in 1800, arguing against the continuance of the war +on the very sound anti-Jacobin ground that if it were unsuccessful it +would inflame French ambition anew, and, if successful, repeat the +experience of the results of rendering France desperate, and simply +reanimate Jacobinism.</p> + +<p>Effective enough too, for the controversial needs of the moment, +was the argument that if France were known, as Ministers pretended, +to be insincere in soliciting peace, "Ministers would certainly treat +with her, since they would again secure the support of the British +people in the war, and expose the ambition of the enemy;" and that, +therefore, the probability was that the British Government knew +France to be sincere, and shrank from negotiation lest it should +expose their own desire to prosecute the war. [<a href="#foot_4-5">5</a>] Most happy, again, +is his criticism of Lord Grenville's note, with its references +to the unprovoked aggression of France (in the matter of the opening of +the Scheldt, etc.) as the sole cause and origin of the war. "If this +were indeed true, in what ignorance must not Mr. Pitt and Mr. Windham +have kept the poor Duke of Portland, who declared in the House of Lords +that the cause of the war was the maintenance of the Christian +religion?"</p> + +<p>To add literary excellence of the higher order to the peculiar +qualities which give force to the newspaper article is for a +journalist, of course, a "counsel of perfection;" but it remains to be +remarked that Coleridge did make this addition in a most conspicuous +manner. Mrs. H. N. Coleridge's three volumes of her father's <i>Essays +on his own Times</i> deserve to live as literature apart altogether +from their merits as journalism. Indeed among the articles in the +<i>Morning Post</i> between 1799 and 1802 may be found some of the +finest specimens of Coleridge's maturer prose style. The character of +Pitt, which appeared on 19th March 1800, is as remarkable for its +literary merits as it is for the almost humorous political perversity +which would not allow the Minister any single merit except that which +he owed to the sedulous rhetorical training received by him from his +father, viz. "a premature and unnatural dexterity in the combination of +words." [<a href="#foot_4-6">6</a>] The letters to Fox, again, though a little artificialised +perhaps by reminiscences of Junius, are full of weight and dignity. But +by far the most piquant illustration of Coleridge's peculiar power is +to be found in the comparison between his own version of Pitt's speech +of 17th February 1800, on the continuance of the war, with the report +of it which appeared in the <i>Times</i> of that date. With the +exception of a few unwarranted elaborations of the arguments here and +there, the two speeches are in substance identical; but the effect of +the contrast between the minister's cold state-paper periods and the +life and glow of the poet-journalist's style is almost comic. Mr. +Gillman records that Canning, calling on business at the editor's, +inquired, as others had done, who was the reporter of the speech for +the <i>Morning Post</i>, and, on being told, remarked drily that the +report "did more credit to his head than to his memory."</p> + +<p>On the whole one can well understand Mr. Stuart's anxiety to secure +Coleridge's permanent collaboration with him in the business of +journalism; and it would be possible to maintain, with less of paradox +than may at first sight appear, that it would have been better not only +for Coleridge himself but for the world at large if the editor's efforts +had been successful. It would indeed have been bowing the neck to the +yoke; but there are some natures upon which constraint of that sort +exercises not a depressing but a steadying influence. What, after all, +would the loss in hours devoted to a comparatively inferior class of +literary labour have amounted to when compared with the gain in much-needed habits of method and regularity, and – more valuable than all to +an intellect like Coleridge's, – in the constant reminder that human +life is finite and the materials of human speculation infinite, and +that even a world-embracing mind must apportion its labour to its day? +There is, however, the great question of health to be considered – +<i>the</i> question, as every one knows, of Coleridge's whole career and +life. If health was destined to give way, in any event – if its +collapse, in fact, was simply the cause of all the lamentable external +results which followed it, while itself due only to predetermined +internal conditions over which the sufferer had no control – then to be +sure <i>cadit qu'stio</i>. At London or at the Lakes, among newspaper +files or old folios, Coleridge's life would in that case have run the +same sad course; and his rejection of Mr. Stuart's offer becomes a +matter of no particular interest to disappointed posterity. But be that +as it may, the "old folios" won the day. In the summer of 1800 Coleridge +quitted London, and having wound up his affairs at his then place of +residence, removed with his wife and children to a new and beautiful +home in that English Lake country with which his name was destined, +like those of Southey and Wordsworth, to be enduringly associated.</p> + +<blockquote style="font-variant: small-caps"><strong>Footnotes</strong></blockquote> + +<p><a name="foot_4-1"></a>1. De Quincey's error, in supposing that Coleridge's visit to Germany +to "complete his education" was made at an earlier date than this +journey with the Wordsworths, is a somewhat singular mistake for one so +well acquainted with the facts of Coleridge's life. Had we not his own +statement that this of 1798 was the first occasion of his quitting his +native country, it so happens that we can account in England for nearly +every month of his time from his leaving Cambridge until this date.</p> + +<p><a name="foot_4-2"></a>2. It has only within a comparatively recent period been ascertained +that the visit of the Wordsworths to Germany was itself another result +of Thomas Wedgwood's generous appreciation of literary merit. It +appears, on the incontrovertible testimony of the Wedgwoods' accounts +with their agents at Hamburg, that the expenses of all three travellers +were defrayed by their friend at home. The credits opened for them +amounted, during the course of their stay abroad, to some £260. – Miss +Meteyard's <i>A Group of Englishmen</i>, p. 99.</p> + +<p><a name="foot_4-3"></a>3. After quoting the +two concluding lines of the poem, "Fire's" rebuke of her inconstant +sisters, in the words</p> + +<p> "I alone am faithful, I + Cling to him everlastingly,"</p> + +<p>De Quincey proceeds: "The sentiment is diabolical; and the question +argued at the London dinner-table (Mr. Sotheby's) was 'Could the writer +have been other than a devil?'... Several of the great guns among the +literary body were present – in particular Sir Walter Scott, and he, we +believe, with his usual good nature, took the apologetic side of the +dispute; in fact, he was in the secret. Nobody else, barring the +author, knew at first whose good name was at stake. The scene must have +been high. The company kicked about the poor diabolic writer's head as +though it had been a tennis-ball. Coleridge, the yet unknown criminal, +absolutely perspired and fumed in pleading for the defendant; the +company demurred; the orator grew urgent; wits began to smoke the case +as an active verb, the advocate to smoke as a neuter verb; the 'fun +grew fast and furious,' until at length the delinquent arose, burning +tears in his eyes, and confessed to an audience now bursting with +stifled laughter (but whom he supposed to be bursting with fiery +indignation), 'Lo, I am he that wrote it.'"</p> + +<p><a name="foot_4-4"></a>4. <i>Sic</i> in <i>Essays on his own Times</i> by S. T. C., the +collection of her father's articles made by Mrs. Nelson (Sara) +Coleridge; but without attributing strange error to Coleridge's own +estimate (in the <i>Biographia Literaria</i>) of the amount of his +journalistic work, it is impossible to believe that this collection, +forming as it does but two small volumes, and a portion of a third, is +anything like complete.</p> + +<p><a name="foot_4-5"></a>5. Alas, that the facts should be so merciless to the most excellent +arguments! Coleridge could not foresee that Napoleon would, years +afterwards, admit in his own Memoirs the insincerity of his +overtures. "I had need of war; a treaty of peace...would have +withered every imagination." And when Mr. Pitt's answer arrived, +"it filled me with a secret satisfaction."</p> + +<p><a name="foot_4-6"></a>6. The following passage, too, is curious as showing how polemics, like +history, repeat themselves. "As his reasonings were, so is his +eloquence. One character pervades his whole being. Words on words, +finely arranged, and so dexterously consequent that the whole bears the +semblance of argument and still keeps awake a sense of surprise; but, +when all is done, nothing rememberable has been said; no one +philosophical remark, no one image, not even a pointed aphorism. Not a +sentence of Mr. Pitt's has ever been quoted, or formed the favourite +phrase of the day – a thing unexampled in any man of equal reputation." +With the alteration of one word – the proper name – this passage might +have been taken straight from some political diatribe of to-day.</p> + + + +<a name="chap5"></a> +<h2>Chapter V</h2> + +<blockquote>Life at Keswick – Second part of <i>Christabel</i> – Failing health – Resort +to opium – The <i>Ode to Dejection</i> – Increasing restlessness – Visit to Malta.</blockquote> + +<p style="text-align: center">[1800-1804.]</p> + +<p>We are now approaching the turning-point, moral and physical, of +Coleridge's career. The next few years determined not only his destiny +as a writer but his life as a man. Between his arrival at Keswick in +the summer of 1800 and his departure for Malta in the spring of 1804 +that fatal change of constitution, temperament, and habits which +governed the whole of his subsequent history had fully established +itself. Between these two dates he was transformed from the Coleridge +of whom his young fellow-students in Germany have left us so pleasing a +picture into the Coleridge whom distressed kinsmen, alienated friends, +and a disappointed public were to have before them for the remainder of +his days. Here, then, at Keswick, and in these first two or three years +of the century – here or nowhere is the key to the melancholy mystery to +be found.</p> + +<p>It is probable that only those who have gone with some +minuteness into the facts of this singular life are aware how great was +the change effected during this very short period of time. When +Coleridge left London for the Lake country he had not completed his +eight-and-twentieth year. Before he was thirty he wrote that <i>Ode to +Dejection</i> in which his spiritual and moral losses are so +pathetically bewailed. His health and spirits, his will and habits, may +not have taken any unalterable bent for the worse until 1804, the year +of his departure for Malta – the date which I have thought it safest to +assign as the definitive close of the earlier and happier period of his +life; but undoubtedly the change had fully manifested itself more than +two years before. And a very great and painful one it assuredly was. We +know from the recorded evidence of Dr. Carrlyon and others that +Coleridge was full of hope and gaiety, full of confidence in himself +and of interest in life during his few months' residence in Germany. +The <i>annus mirabilis</i> of his poetic life was but two years behind +him, and his achievements of 1797-98 seemed to him but a mere earnest +of what he was destined to accomplish. His powers of mental +concentration were undiminished, as his student days at Göttingen +sufficiently proved; his conjugal and family affections, as Dr. +Carrlyon notes for us, were still unimpaired; his own verse gives signs +of a home-sickness and a yearning for his own fireside which were in +melancholy contrast with the restlessness of his later years. Nay, even +after his return to England, and during the six months of his regular +work on the <i>Morning Post</i>, the vigour of his political articles +entirely negatives the idea that any relaxation of intellectual energy +had as yet set in. Yet within six months of his leaving London for +Keswick there begins a progressive decline in Coleridge's literary +activity in every form. The second part of <i>Christabel</i>, beautiful +but inferior to the first, was composed in the autumn of 1800, and for +the next two years, so far as the higher forms of literature are +concerned, "the rest is silence." The author of the prefatory memoir in +the edition of Coleridge's <i>Poetical and Dramatic Works</i> (1880), +enumerates some half-dozen slight pieces contributed to the <i>Morning +Post</i> in 1801, but declares that Coleridge's poetical contributions +to this paper during 1802 were "very rich and varied, and included the +magnificent ode entitled <i>Dejection</i>." Only the latter clause of +this statement is entitled, I think, to command our assent. Varied +though the list may be, it is hardly to be described as "rich." It +covers only about seven weeks in the autumn of 1802, and, with the +exception of the <i>Lovers' Resolution</i> and the "magnificent ode" +referred to, the pieces are of the shortest and slightest kind. Nor is +it accurate to say that the "political articles of the same period were +also numerous and important." On the contrary, it would appear from an +examination of Mrs. H. N. Coleridge's collection that her father's +contributions to the <i>Post</i> between his departure from London and +the autumn of 1802 were few and intermittent, and in August 1803 the +proprietorship of that journal passed out of Mr. Stuart's hands. It is, +in short, I think, impossible to doubt that very shortly after his +migration to the Lake country he practically ceased not only to write +poetry but to produce any mentionable quantity of <i>complete</i> work +in the prose form. His mind, no doubt, was incessantly active +throughout the whole of the deplorable period upon which we are now +entering; but it seems pretty certain that its activity was not poetic +nor even critical, but purely philosophical, and that the products of +that activity went exclusively to <i>marginalia</i> and the pages of +note-books.</p> + +<p>Yet unfortunately we have almost no evidence, personal or +other, from which we can with any certainty construct the +psychological – if one should not rather say the physiological, or +better still, perhaps, the pathological – history of this cardinal epoch +in Coleridge's life. Miss Wordsworth's diary is nearly silent about him +for the next few years; he was living indeed some dozen miles from her +brother at Grasmere, and they could not therefore have been in daily +intercourse. Southey did not come to the Lakes till 1803, and the +records of his correspondence only begin therefore from that date. Mr. +Cottle's <i>Reminiscences</i> are here a blank; Charles Lamb's +correspondence yields little; and though De Quincey has plenty to say +about this period in his characteristic fashion, it must have been +based upon pure gossip, as he cites no authorities, and did not himself +make Coleridge's acquaintance till six years afterwards. This, however, +is at least certain, that his gloomy accounts of his own health begin +from a period at which his satisfaction with his new abode was still as +fresh as ever. The house which he had taken, now historic as the +residence of two famous Englishmen, enjoyed a truly beautiful situation +and the command of a most noble view. It stood in the vale of +Derwentwater, on the bank of the river Greta, and about a mile from the +lake. When Coleridge first entered it, it was uncompleted, and an +arrangement was made by which, after completion, it was to be divided +between the tenant and the landlord, a Mr. Jackson. As it turned out, +however, the then completed portion was shared by them in common, the +other portion, and eventually the whole, being afterwards occupied by +Southey. In April 1801, some eight or nine months after his taking +possession of Greta Hall, Coleridge thus describes it to its future +occupant: – </p> + +<p>"Our house stands on a low hill, the whole front of which +is one field and an enormous garden, nine-tenths of which is a nursery +garden. Behind the house is an orchard and a small wood on a steep +slope, at the foot of which is the river Greta, which winds round and +catches the evening's light in the front of the house. In front we have +a giant camp – an encamped army of tent-like mountains which, by an +inverted arch, gives a view of another vale. On our right the lovely +vale and the wedge-shaped lake of Bassenthwaite; and on our left +Derwentwater and Lodore full in view, and the fantastic mountains of +Borrowdale. Behind is the massy Skiddaw, smooth, green, high, with two +chasms and a tent-like ridge in the larger. A fairer scene you have not +seen in all your wanderings."</p> + +<p>There is here no note of discontent with +the writer's surroundings; and yet, adds Mr. Cuthbert Southey in his +<i>Life and Correspondence</i> of his father, the remainder of this +letter was filled by Coleridge with "a most gloomy account of his +health." Southey writes him in reply that he is convinced that his +friend's "complaint is gouty, that good living is necessary and a good +climate." In July of the same year he received a visit from Southey at +Greta Hall, and one from Charles and Mary Lamb in the following summer, +and it is probable that during such intervals of pleasurable excitement +his health and spirits might temporarily rally. But henceforward and +until his departure for Malta we gather nothing from any source as to +Coleridge's <i>normal</i> condition of body and mind which is not +unfavourable, and it is quite certain that he had long before 1804 +enslaved himself to that fatal drug which was to remain his tyrant for +the rest of his days.</p> + +<p>When, then, and how did this slavery begin? What +was the precise date of Coleridge's first experiences of opium, and +what the original cause of his taking it? Within what time did its use +become habitual? To what extent was the decline of his health the +effect of the evil habit, and to what, if any, extent its cause? And +how far, if at all, can the deterioration of his character and powers +be attributed to a decay of physical constitution, brought about by +influences beyond the sufferer's own control?</p> + +<p>Could every one of these questions be completely answered, we should be +in a position to solve the very obscure and painful problem before us; +but though some of them can be answered with more or less approach to +completeness, there is only one of them which can be finally disposed +of. It is certain, and it is no doubt matter for melancholy +satisfaction to have ascertained it, that Coleridge first had +recourse to opium as an anodyne. It was Nature's revolt from pain, and +not her appetite for pleasure, which drove him to the drug; and though +De Quincey, with his almost comical malice, remarks that, though +Coleridge began in the desire to obtain relief "there is no proof that +he did not end in voluptuousness," there is on the other hand no proof +whatever that he did so end – <i>until the habit was formed</i>. It is +quite consistent with probability, and only accords with Coleridge's +own express affirmations, to believe that it was the medicinal efficacy +of opium, and this quality of it alone, which induced him to resort to +it again and again until his senses contracted that well-known and +insatiable craving for the peculiar excitement, "voluptuous" only to +the initiated, which opium-intoxication creates. But let Coleridge +speak on this point for himself. Writing in April 1826 he says: – </p> + +<p>"I wrote a few stanzas three-and-twenty years ago, soon after my eyes +had been opened to the true nature of the habit into which I had been +ignorantly deluded by the seeming magic effects of opium, in the +sudden removal of a supposed rheumatic affection, attended with +swellings in my knees and palpitation of the heart and pains all over +me, by which I had been bed-ridden for nearly six months. Unhappily +among my neighbours' and landlord's books were a large number of +medical reviews and magazines. I had always a fondness (a common case, +but most mischievous turn with reading men who are at all dyspeptic) +for dabbling in medical writings; and in one of these reviews I met a +case which I fancied very like my own, in which a cure had been +effected by the Kendal Black Drop. In an evil hour I procured it: it +worked miracles – the swellings disappeared, the pains vanished. I was +all alive, and all around me being as ignorant as myself, nothing +could exceed my triumph. I talked of nothing else, prescribed the +newly-discovered panacea for all complaints, and carried a little +about with me not to lose any opportunity of administering 'instant +relief and speedy cure' to all complainers, stranger or friend, gentle +or simple. Alas! it is with a bitter smile, a laugh of gall and +bitterness, that I recall this period of unsuspecting delusion, and +how I first became aware of the Maelstrom, the fatal whirlpool to +which I was drawing, just when the current was beyond my strength to +stem. The state of my mind is truly portrayed in the following +effusion, for God knows! that from that time I was the victim of pain +and terror, nor had I at any time taken the flattering poison as a +stimulus or for any craving after pleasurable sensation."</p> + +<p>The "effusion" in question has parted company with the autobiographical +note, and the author of the prefatory memoir above quoted conjectures +it to have been a little poem entitled the <i>Visionary Hope</i>; but I am +myself of opinion, after a careful study of both pieces, that it is +more probably the <i>Pains of Sleep</i>, which moreover is known to +have been written in 1803. But whichever it be, its date is fixed in +that year by the statement in the autobiographical note of 1826 that +the stanzas referred to in it were written "twenty-three years ago." +Thus, then, we have the two facts established, that the opium-taking +habit had its origin in a bodily ailment, and that at some time in +1803 that habit had become confirmed. The disastrous experiment in +amateur therapeutics, which was the means of implanting it, could not +have taken place, according to the autobiographical note, until at +least six months after Coleridge's arrival at Keswick, and perhaps not +for some months later yet. At any rate, it seems tolerably certain +that it was not till the spring of 1801, when the climate of the +Lake country first began to tell unfavourably on his health, that +the "Kendal Black Drop" was taken. Possibly it may have been about +the time (April 1801) when he wrote the letter to Southey which has +been quoted above, and which, it will be remembered, contained "so +gloomy an account of his health." How painfully ailing he was at this +time we know from a variety of sources, from some of which we also +gather that he must have been a sufferer in more or less serious +forms from his boyhood upwards. Mr. Gillman, for instance, who speaks +on this point with the twofold authority of confidant and medical +expert, records a statement of Coleridge's to the effect that, as a +result of such schoolboy imprudences as "swimming over the New River +in my clothes and remaining in them, full half the time from seventeen +to eighteen was passed by me in the sick ward of Christ's Hospital, +afflicted with jaundice and rheumatic fever." From these +indiscretions and their consequences "may be dated," Mr. Gillman +thinks, "all his bodily sufferings in future life." That he was a +martyr to periodical attacks of rheumatism for some years before his +migration to Keswick is a conclusion resting upon something more than +conjecture. The <i>Ode to the Departing Year</i> (1796) was written, as +he has himself told us, under a severe attack of rheumatism in the +head. In 1797 he describes himself in ill health, and as forced to +retire on that account to the "lonely farmhouse between Porlock and +London on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire," where +<i>Kubla Khan</i> was written. [<a href="#foot_5-1">1</a>]</p> + +<p>Thus much is, moreover, certain, +that whatever were Coleridge's health and habits during the first two +years of his residence at Keswick, his career as a poet – that is to +say, as a poet of the first order – was closed some months before that +period had expired. The ode entitled <i>Dejection</i>, to which +reference has so often been made, was written on the 4th of April 1802, +and the evidential importance which attaches, in connection with the +point under inquiry, to this singularly pathetic utterance has been +almost universally recognised. Coleridge has himself cited its most +significant passage in the <i>Biographia Literaria</i> as supplying the +best description of his mental state at the time when it was written. +De Quincey quotes it with appropriate comments in his <i>Coleridge and +Opium-Eating</i>. Its testimony is reverently invoked by the poet's son +in the introductory essay prefixed by him to his edition of his +father's works. The earlier stanzas are, however, so necessary to the +comprehension of Coleridge's mood at this time that a somewhat long +extract must be made. In the opening stanza he expresses a longing that +the storm which certain atmospheric signs of a delusively calm evening +appear to promise might break forth, so that</p> + +<p> "Those sounds which oft have raised me, whilst they awed, + And sent my soul abroad, + Might now perhaps their wonted impulse give, + Might startle this dull pain, and make it move and live."</p> + +<p>And thus, with ever-deepening sadness, the poem proceeds:</p> + +<p> "A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear, + A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief, + Which finds no natural outlet, no relief, + In word, or sigh, or tear – + O Lady! in this wan and heartless mood, + To other thoughts by yonder throstle woo'd, + All this long eve, so balmy and serene, + Have I been gazing on the western sky, + And its peculiar tint of yellow green: + And still I gaze – and with how blank an eye! + And those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars, + That give away their motion to the stars; + Those stars, that glide behind them or between, + Now sparkling, now bedimmed, but always seen: + Yon crescent Moon as fixed as if it grew + In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue; + I see them all so excellently fair, + I see, not feel how beautiful they are!</p> + +<p> "My genial spirits fail, + And what can these avail + To lift the smothering weight from off my breast? + It were a vain endeavour, + Though I should gaze for ever + On that green light that lingers in the west: + I may not hope from outward forms to win + The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.</p> + +<p> "O Lady! we receive but what we give, + And in our life alone does nature live: + Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud! + And would we aught behold, of higher worth, + Than that inanimate cold world allowed + To the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd, + Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth, + A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud + Enveloping the earth – + And from the soul itself must there be sent + A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth, + Of all sweet sounds the life and element!</p> + +<p> "O pure of heart! thou need'st not ask of me + What this strong music in the soul may be! + What, and wherein it doth exist, + This light, this glory, this fair luminous mist, + This beautiful and beauty-making power. + Joy, virtuous Lady! Joy that ne'er was given, + Save to the pure, and in their purest hour, + Life, and Life's effluence, cloud at once and shower, + Joy, Lady! is the spirit and the power, + Which, wedding Nature to us, gives in dower + A new Earth and new Heaven, + Undreamt of by the sensual and the proud – + Joy is the sweet voice, Joy the luminous cloud – + We in ourselves rejoice! + And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight, + All melodies the echoes of that voice, + All colours a suffusion from that light."</p> + +<p>And then follows the much quoted, profoundly touching, deeply significant +stanza to which we have referred: – </p> + +<p> "There was a time when, though my path was rough, + This joy within me dallied with distress, + And all misfortunes were but as the stuff + Whence Fancy made me dreams of happiness: + For hope grew round me, like the twining vine, + And fruits, and foliage, not my own, seemed mine. + But now afflictions how me down to earth: + Nor care I that they rob me of my mirth, + But O! each visitation + Suspends what nature gave me at my birth, + My shaping spirit of Imagination. + For not to think of what I needs must feel, + But to be still and patient, all I can; + And haply by abstruse research to steal + From my own nature all the natural Man – + This was my sole resource, my only plan: + Till that which suits a part infects the whole, + And now is almost grown the habit of my Soul."</p> + +<p>Sadder lines than these were never perhaps written by any poet in +description of his own feelings. And what gives them their peculiar +sadness – as also, of course, their special biographical value – is that +they are not, like Shelley's similarly entitled stanzas, the mere +expression of a passing mood. They are the record of a life change, a +veritable threnody over a spiritual death. For there can be no doubt – +his whole subsequent history goes to show it – that Coleridge's "shaping +spirit of Imagination" was in fact dead when these lines were written. +To a man of stronger moral fibre a renascence of the poetical instinct +in other forms might, as I have suggested above, been possible; but the +poet of <i>Christabel</i> and the <i>Ancient Mariner</i> was dead. The +metaphysician had taken his place, and was striving, in abstruse +research, to live in forgetfulness of the loss. Little more, that is to +say, than a twelvemonth after the composition of the second part of +<i>Christabel</i> the impulse which gave birth to it had passed away +for ever. Opium-taking had doubtless begun by this time – may +conceivably indeed have begun nearly a year before – and the mere +<i>mood</i> of the poem, the temporary phase of feeling which directed +his mind inwards into deeper reflections on its permanent state, is no +doubt strongly suggestive, in its excessive depression, of the terrible +reaction which is known to follow upon opium-excitement. But, I +confess, it seems to me improbable that even the habitual use of the +stimulant for so comparatively short a time as twelve months could have +produced so profound a change in Coleridge's intellectual nature. I +cannot but think that De Quincey overstates the case in declaring that +"opium killed Coleridge as a poet," though it may well be that, after +the collapse of health, which appears to me to have been the real +<i>causa causans</i> in the matter, had killed the poet as we know him, +opium prevented his resurrection in another and it may be but little +inferior form. On the whole, in fact, the most probable account of this +all-important era in Coleridge's life appears to me to be this: that in +the course of 1801, as he was approaching his thirtieth year, a +distinct change for the worse – precipitated possibly, as Mr. Gillman +thinks, by the climate of his new place of abode – took place in his +constitution; that his rheumatic habit of body, and the dyspeptic +trouble by which it was accompanied became confirmed; and that the +severe attacks of the acute form of the malady which he underwent +produced such a permanent lowering of his vitality and animal spirits +as, <i>first</i>, to extinguish the creative impulse, and <i>then</i> +to drive him to the physical anodyne of opium and to the mental +stimulant of metaphysics.</p> + +<p>From the summer of 1801, at any rate, his <i>malaise</i>, both of mind +and body, appears to have grown apace. Repeated letters from Southey +allow us to see how deeply concerned he was at this time about his +friend's condition. Plans of foreign travel are discussed between +them, and Southey endeavours in vain to spur his suffering and +depressed correspondent to "the assertion of his supremacy" in some +new literary work. But, with the exception of his occasional +contributions to the press, whatever he committed to paper +during these years exists only, if at all, in a fragmentary form. And +his restlessness, continually on the increase, appears by the end of +1802 to have become ungovernable. In November of that year he eagerly +accepted an offer from Thomas Wedgwood to become his companion on a +tour, and he spent this and the greater part of the following month in +South Wales with some temporary advantage, it would seem, to his health +and spirits. "Coleridge," writes Mr. Wedgwood to a friend, "is all +kindness to me, and in prodigious favour here. He is quite easy, +cheerful, and takes great pains to make himself pleasant. He is +willing, indeed desirous, to accompany me to any part of the globe." +"Coll and I," he writes on another occasion, the abbreviation of name +having been suggested to him by Coleridge himself, "harmonise +amazingly," and adds that his companion "takes long rambles, and writes +a great deal." But the fact that such changes of air and scene produced +no permanent effect upon the invalid after his return to his own home +appears to show that now, at any rate, his fatal habit had obtained a +firm hold upon him. And his "writing a great deal resulted" only in the +filling of many note-books, and perhaps the sketching out of many of +those vast schemes of literary labour of which he was destined to leave +so remarkable a collection at his death. One such we find him +forwarding to Southey in the August of 1803 – the plan of a Bibliotheca +Britannica, or "History of British Literature, bibliographical, +biographical, and critical," in eight volumes. The first volume was to +contain a "complete history of all Welsh, Saxon, and Erse books that +are not translations, but the native growth of Britain;" to accomplish +which, writes Coleridge, "I will with great pleasure join you in +learning Welsh and Erse." The second volume was to contain the history +of English poetry and poets, including "all prose truly poetical." The +third volume "English prose, considered as to style, as to eloquence, +as to general impressiveness; a history of styles and manners, their +causes, their birthplace and parentage, their analysis." The fourth +volume would take up "the history of metaphysics, theology, medicine, +alchemy; common, canon, and Roman law from Alfred to Henry VII." The +fifth would "carry on metaphysics and ethics to the present day in the +first half, and comprise in the second half the theology of all the +reformers." In the sixth and seventh volumes were to be included "all +the articles you (Southey) can get on all the separate arts and +sciences that have been treated of in books since the Reformation; and +by this time," concludes the enthusiastic projector, "the book, if it +answered at all, would have gained so high a reputation that you need +not fear having whom you liked to write the different articles – +medicine, surgery, chemistry, etc.; navigation, travellers' voyages, +etc., etc." There is certainly a melancholy humour in the formulation +of so portentous a scheme by a man who was at this moment wandering +aimlessly among the lakes and mountains, unable to settle down to any +definite piece of literary work, or even to throw off a fatal habit, +which could not fail, if persevered in, to destroy all power of steady +application in the future. That neither the comic nor the pathetic +element in the situation was lost upon Southey is evident from his +half-sad, half-satirical, wholly winning reply. "Your plan," he writes, +"is too good, too gigantic, quite beyond my powers. If you had my +tolerable state of health and that love of steady and productive +employment which is now grown into a necessary habit with me, if you +were to execute and would execute it, it would be beyond all doubt the +most valuable work of any age or any country; but I cannot fill up such +an outline. No man can better feel where he fails than I do, and to +rely upon you for whole quartos! Dear Coleridge, the smile that comes +with that thought is a very melancholy one; and if Edith saw me now she +would think my eyes were weak again, when in truth the humour that +covers them springs from another cause." A few weeks after this +interchange of correspondence Coleridge was once again to prove how far +he was from possessing Southey's "tolerable state of health." +Throughout the whole of this year he had been more restless than ever. +In January 1803 we find him staying with Southey at Bristol, "suffering +terribly from the climate, and talking of going abroad." A week later +he is at Stowey, planning schemes, not destined to be realised, of +foreign travel with Wedgwood. Returning again to Keswick, he started, +after a few months' quiescence, on 15th August, in company with +Wordsworth and his sister, for a tour in Scotland, but after a +fortnight he found himself too ill to proceed. The autumn rains set in, +and "poor Coleridge," writes Miss Wordsworth, "being very unwell, +determined to send his clothes to Edinburgh, and make the best of his +way thither, being afraid to face much wet weather in an open +carriage." It is possible, however, that his return to Keswick may have +been hastened by the circumstance that Southey, who had paid a brief +visit to the Lake country two years before, was expected in a few days +at the house which was destined to be his abode for the longest portion +of his life. He arrived at Greta Hall on 7th September 1803, and from +time to time during the next six months his correspondence gives us +occasional glimpses of Coleridge's melancholy state. At the end of +December, his health growing steadily worse, he conceived the project +of a voyage to Madeira, and quitted Keswick with the intention, after +paying a short visit to the Wordsworths, of betaking himself to London +to make preparations. His stay at Grasmere, however, was longer than he +had counted on. "He was detained for a month by a severe attack of +illness, induced, if his description is to be relied on, by the use of +narcotics. [<a href="#foot_5-2">2</a>] Unsuspicious of the cause, Mrs. and Miss Wordsworth +nursed him with the tenderest affection, while the poet himself, +usually a parsimonious man, forced upon him, to use Coleridge's own +words, a hundred pounds in the event of his going to Madeira, and his +friend Stuart offered to befriend him." From Grasmere he went to +Liverpool, where he spent a pleasant week with his old Unitarian +friend, Dr. Crompton, and arrived in London at the close of 1803. Here, +however, his plans were changed. Malta was substituted for Madeira, in +response to an invitation from his friend Mr., afterwards Sir John, +Stoddart, then resident as judge in the Mediterranean island. By 12th +March, as we gather from the Southey correspondence, the change of +arrangements had been made. Two days afterwards he receives a letter of +valediction from his "old friend and brother" at Greta Hall, and on 2d +April 1804, he sailed from England in the <i>Speedwell</i>, dropping +anchor sixteen days later in Valetta harbour.</p> + +<blockquote style="font-variant: small-caps"><strong>Footnotes</strong></blockquote> + +<p><a name="foot_5-1"></a>1. Were it not for Coleridge's express statement that he first took +opium at Keswick, one would be inclined to attribute the gorgeous but +formless imagery of that poem to the effects of the stimulant. It is +certainly very like a metrical version of one of the pleasant variety +of opium-dreams described in De Quincey's poetic prose.</p> + +<p><a name="foot_5-2"></a>2. See Miss Meteyard (<i>A Group of Englishmen</i>, p. 223). Her +evidence, however, on any point otherwise doubtful in Coleridge's +history should be received with caution, as her estimate of the poet +certainly errs somewhat on the side of excessive harshness.</p> + + + +<a name="chap6"></a> +<h2>Chapter VI</h2> + +<blockquote>Stay at Malta – Its injurious effects – Return to England – Meeting +with De Quincey – Residence in London – First series of lectures.</blockquote> + +<p style='text-align: center'>[1806-1809.]</p> + +<p>Never was human being destined so sadly and signally to illustrate the +<i>coelum non animum</i> aphorism as the unhappy passenger on the +<i>Speedwell</i>. Southey shall describe his condition when he left +England; and his own pathetic lines to William Wordsworth will picture +him to us on his return. "You are in great measure right about +Coleridge," writes the former to his friend Rickman, "he is worse in +body than you seem to believe; but the main cause lies in his own +management of himself, or rather want of management. His mind is in a +perpetual St. Vitus's dance – eternal activity without action. At times +he feels mortified that he should have done so little, but this feeling +never produces any exertion. 'I will begin to-morrow,' he says, and +thus he has been all his lifelong letting to-day slip. He has had no +heavy calamities in life, and so contrives to be miserable about +trifles. Poor fellow, there is no one thing which gives me so much pain +as the witnessing such a waste of unequalled powers." Then, after +recalling the case of a highly promising schoolfellow, who had made +shipwreck of his life, and whom "a few individuals only remember with a +sort of horror and affection, which just serves to make them melancholy +whenever they think of him or mention his name," he adds: "This will +not be the case with Coleridge; the <i>disjecta membra</i> will be +found if he does not die early: but having so much to do, so many +errors to weed out of the world which he is capable of eradicating, if +he does die without doing his work, it would half break my heart, for +no human being has had more talents allotted." Such being his closest +friend's account of him, and knowing, as we now do (what Southey +perhaps had no suspicion of at the time), the chief if not the sole or +original cause of his morally nerveless condition, it is impossible not +to feel that he did the worst possible thing for himself in taking this +journey to Malta. In quitting England he cut himself off from those +last possibilities of self-conquest which the society and counsels of +his friends might otherwise have afforded him, and the consequences +were, it is to be feared, disastrous. After De Quincey's incredibly +cool assertion that it was "notorious that Coleridge began the use of +opium, not as a relief from any bodily pain or nervous irritations, +since his constitution was strong and excellent(!), but as a source of +luxurious sensations," we must receive anything which he has to say on +this particular point with the utmost caution; but there is only too +much plausibility in his statement that, Coleridge being necessarily +thrown, while at Malta, "a good deal upon his own resources in the +narrow society of a garrison, he there confirmed and cherished ... his +habit of taking opium in large quantities." Contrary to his +expectations, moreover, the Maltese climate failed to benefit him. At +first, indeed, he did experience some feeling of relief, but +afterwards, according to Mr. Gillman, he spoke of his rheumatic limbs +as "lifeless tools," and of the "violent pains in his bowels, which +neither opium, ether, nor peppermint combined could relieve."</p> + +<p>Occupation, however, was not wanting to him, if occupation +could have availed in the then advanced stage of his case. He early +made the acquaintance of the governor of the island, Sir Alexander +Ball, who, having just lost his secretary by death, requested Cole-ridge to undertake that official's duties until his successor should be +appointed. By this arrangement the governor and the public service in +all likelihood profited more than the provisional secretary; for +Coleridge's literary abilities proved very serviceable in the +department of diplomatic correspondence. The dignities of the office, +Mr. Gillman tells us, no doubt on Coleridge's own authority, "he never +attempted to support; he was greatly annoyed at what he thought its +unnecessary parade, and he petitioned Sir Alexander Ball to be relieved +from it." The purely mechanical duties of the post, too, appear to have +troubled him. He complains, in one of the journals which he kept during +this period, of having been "for months past incessantly employed in +official tasks, subscribing, examining, administering oaths, auditing, +etc." On the whole it would seem that the burden of his secretarial +employment, though doubtless it would have been found light enough by +any one accustomed to public business, was rather a weariness to the +flesh than a distraction to the mind; while in the meantime a new +symptom of disorder – a difficulty of breathing, to which he was always +afterwards subject – began to manifest itself in his case. Probably he +was glad enough – relieved, in more than one sense of the word – when, in +the autumn of 1805, the new secretary arrived at Malta to take his +place.</p> + +<p>On 27th September Coleridge quitted the island on his homeward +journey <i>vi´</i> Italy, stopping for a short time at Syracuse on his +way. At Naples, which he reached on the 15th of December, he made a +longer stay, and in Rome his sojourn lasted some months. Unfortunately, +for a reason which will presently appear, there remains no written +record of his impressions of the Eternal City; and though Mr. Gillman +assures us that the gap is "partly filled by his own verbal account, +repeated at various times to the writer of this memoir," the public of +to-day is only indebted to "the writer of this memoir" for the not very +startling information that Coleridge, "while in Rome, was actively +employed in visiting the great works of art, statues, pictures, +buildings, palaces, etc. etc., observations on which he minuted down +for publication." It is somewhat more interesting to learn that he made +the acquaintance of many literary and artistic notabilities at that +time congregated there, including Tieck, the German poet and novelist, +and the American painter Alston, to whose skill we owe what is reputed +to be the best of his many not easily reconcilable portraits. The loss +of his Roman memoranda was indirectly brought about by a singular +incident, his account of which has met with some undeserved ridicule at +the hands of Tory criticism. When about to quit Rome for England +<i>vié</i> Switzerland and Germany he took the precaution of inquiring +of Baron von Humboldt, brother of the traveller, and then Prussian +Minister at the Court of Rome, whether the proposed route was safe, and +was by him informed that he would do well to keep out of the reach of +Bonaparte, who was meditating the seizure of his person. According to +Coleridge, indeed, an order for his arrest had actually been +transmitted to Rome, and he was only saved from its execution by the +connivance of the "good old Pope," Pius VII., who sent him a passport +and counselled his immediate flight. Hastening to Leghorn, he +discovered an American vessel ready to sail for England, on board of +which he embarked. On the voyage she was chased by a French vessel, +which so alarmed the captain that he compelled Coleridge to throw his +papers, including these precious MSS., overboard. The wrath of the +First Consul against him was supposed to have been excited by his +contributions to the <i>Morning Post</i>, an hypothesis which De +Quincey reasonably finds by no means so ridiculous as it appeared to a +certain writer in <i>Blackwood</i>, who treated it as the "very +consummation of moonstruck vanity," and compared it to "John Dennis's +frenzy in retreating from the sea-coast under the belief that Louis +XIV. had commissioned commissaries to land on the English shore and +make a dash at his person." It must be remembered, however, that Mr. +Fox, to whose statement on such a point Napoleon would be likely to +attach especial weight, had declared in the House of Commons that the +rupture of the Peace of Amiens had been brought about by certain essays +in the <i>Morning Post</i>, and there is certainly no reason to believe +that a tyrant whose animosity against literary or quasi-literary +assailants ranged from Madame de Staël down to the bookseller Palm +would have regarded a man of Coleridge's reputation in letters as +beneath the stoop of his vengeance.</p> + +<p>After an absence of two years and a half Coleridge arrived in England +in August 1806. That his then condition of mind and body was a +profoundly miserable one, and that he himself was acutely conscious +of it, will be seen later on in certain extracts from his correspondence; +but his own <i>Lines to William Wordsworth</i> – lines "composed on the +night after his recitation of a poem on the growth of an individual +mind" – contain an even more tragic expression of his state. It was +Wordsworth's pensive retrospect of their earlier years together which +awoke the bitterest pangs of self-reproach in his soul, and wrung from +it the cry which follows: – </p> + +<p> "Ah! as I listened with a heart forlorn + The pulses of my being beat anew: + And even as life returns upon the drowned, + Life's joy rekindling roused a throng of pains – + Keen pangs of Love, awakening as a babe + Turbulent, with an outcry in the heart; + And fears self-willed, that shunned the eye of hope; + And hope that scarce would know itself from fear; + Sense of past youth, and manhood come in vain, + And genius given, and knowledge won in vain; + And all which I had culled in wood-walks wild, + And all which patient toil had reared, and all, + Commune with thee had opened out – but flowers + Strewn on my corse, and borne upon my bier, + In the same coffin, for the self-same grave!"</p> + +<p>A dismal and despairing strain indeed, but the situation unhappily was +not less desperate. We are, in fact, entering upon that period of +Coleridge's life – a period, roughly speaking, of about ten years – which +no admirer of his genius, no lover of English letters, no one, it might +even be said, who wishes to think well of human nature, can ever +contemplate without pain. His history from the day of his landing in +England in August 1806 till the day when he entered Mr. Gillman's house +in 1816 is one long and miserable story of self-indulgence and self-reproach, of lost opportunities, of neglected duties, of unfinished +undertakings. His movements and his occupation for the first year after +his return are not now traceable with exactitude, but his time was +apparently spent partly in London and partly at Grasmere and Keswick. +When in London, Mr. Stuart, who had now become proprietor of the +<i>Courier</i>, allowed him to occupy rooms at the office of that +newspaper to save him expense; and Coleridge, though his regular +connection with the <i>Courier</i> did not begin till some years +afterwards, may possibly have repaid the accommodation by occasional +contributions or by assistance to its editor in some other form. It +seems certain, at any rate, that if he was earning no income in this +way he was earning none at all. His friend and patron, Mr. Thomas +Wedgwood, had died while he was in Malta; but the full pension of £150 +per annum bestowed upon him by the two brothers jointly continued to be +paid to him by Josiah, the senior. Coleridge, however, had landed in +England in ignorance of his patron's death. He had wholly neglected to +keep up any correspondence with the Wedgwoods during his stay in Malta, +and though "dreadfully affected" by it, as Mr. Poole records, he seems +to have allowed nearly a year to elapse before communicating with the +surviving brother. The letter which he then wrote deserves quotation, +not only as testimony to his physical and pecuniary condition on his +arrival in England, but as affording a distressing picture of the +morbid state of his emotions and the enfeebled condition of his will. +"As to the reasons for my silence, they are," he incoherently begins, +"impossible, and the numbers of the <i>causes</i> of it, with the +almost weekly expectation for the last eight months of receiving my +books, manuscripts, etc. from Malta, has been itself a cause of +increasing the procrastination which constant ill health, despondency, +domestic distractions, and embarrassment from accidents, equally +unconnected with my will or conduct" [every cause mentioned, it will be +seen, but the true one], "had already seated deep in my very muscles, +as it were. I do not mean to accuse myself of idleness – I have enough +of self-crimination without adding imaginary articles – but in all +things that affect my moral feelings I have sunk under such a strange +cowardice of pain that I have not unfrequently kept letters from +persons dear to me for weeks together unopened. After a most miserable +passage from Leghorn of fifty-five days, during which my life was twice +given over, I found myself again in my native country, ill, penniless, +and worse than homeless. I had been near a month in the country before +I ventured or could summon courage enough to ask a question concerning +you and yours, and yet God Almighty knows that every hour the thought +had been gnawing at my heart. I then for the first time heard of that +event which sounded like my own knell, without its natural hope or +sense of rest. Such shall I be (is the thought that haunts me), but O! +not such; O! with what a different retrospect! But I owe it to justice +to say, Such good I truly can do myself, etc., etc." The rest of this +painfully inarticulate letter is filled with further complaints of ill +health, with further protestations of irresponsibility for the neglect +of duties, and with promises, never to be fulfilled, of composing or +assisting others to compose a memoir of Thomas Wedgwood, who, in +addition to his general repute as a man of culture, had made a special +mark by his speculations in psychology.</p> + +<p>The singular expression, "worse than homeless," and the reference to +domestic distractions, appear to indicate that some estrangement had +already set in between Coleridge and his wife. De Quincey's testimony +to its existence at the time (a month or so later) when he made +Coleridge's acquaintance may, subject to the usual deductions, be +accepted as trustworthy; and, of course, for aught we know, it may +then have been already of some years' standing. That the provocation +to it on the husband's part may be so far antedated is at least a +reasonable conjecture. There may be nothing – in all likelihood there +is nothing – worth attention in De Quincey's gossip about the young +lady, "intellectually very much superior to Mrs. Coleridge, who +became a neighbour and daily companion of Coleridge's walks" at +Keswick. But if there be no foundation for his remarks on "the +mischiefs of a situation which exposed Mrs. Coleridge to an invidious +comparison with a more intellectual person," there is undoubtedly +plenty of point in the immediately following observation that "it +was most unfortunate for Coleridge himself to be continually +compared with one so ideally correct and regular in his habits as Mr. +Southey." The passion of female jealousy assuredly did not need to be +called into play to account for the alienation of Mrs. Coleridge from +her husband. Mrs. Carlyle has left on record her pathetic lament over +the fate of a woman who marries a man of genius; but a man of genius of +the coldly selfish and exacting type of the Chelsea philosopher would +probably be a less severe burden to a woman of housewifely instincts +than the weak, unmethodical, irresolute, shiftless being that Coleridge +had by this time become. After the arrival of the Southeys, Mrs. +Coleridge would indeed have been more than human if she had not looked +with an envious eye upon the contrast between her sister Edith's lot +and her own. For this would give her the added pang of perceiving that +she was specially unlucky in the matter, and that men of genius could +("if they chose," as she would probably, though not perhaps quite +justly have put it) make very good husbands indeed. If one poet could +finish his poems, and pay his tradesmen's bills, and work steadily for +the publishers in his own house without the necessity of periodical +flittings to various parts of the United Kingdom or the Continent, why, +so could another. With such reflections as these Mrs. Coleridge's mind +was no doubt sadly busy during the early years of her residence at the +Lakes, and, since their causes did not diminish but rather increased in +intensity as time went on, the estrangement between them – or rather, to +do Coleridge justice, her estrangement from her husband – had, by 1806, +no doubt become complete. The fatal habit which even up to this time +seems to have been unknown to most of his friends could hardly have +been a secret to his wife, and his four or five years of slavery to it +may well have worn out her patience.</p> + +<p>This single cause indeed, namely, Coleridge's addiction to opium, is +quite sufficient, through the humiliations, discomfort, and privations, +pecuniary and otherwise, for which the vice was no doubt mediately or +immediately responsible, to account for the unhappy issue of a union +which undoubtedly was one of love to begin with, and which seems to +have retained that character for at least six years of its course. +We have noted the language of warm affection in which the "beloved +Sara" is spoken of in the early poems, and up to the time of +Coleridge's stay in Germany his feelings towards his wife remained +evidently unchanged. To his children, of whom three out of the four +born to him had survived, he was deeply attached; and the remarkable +promise displayed by the eldest son, Hartley, and his youngest child +and only daughter, Sara, made them objects of no less interest to his +intellect than to his heart. "Hartley," he writes to Mr. Poole in +1803, "is a strange, strange boy, exquisitely wild, an utter +visionary; like the moon among thin clouds, he moves in a circle +of light of his own making. He alone is a light of his own." And of his +daughter in the same poetic strain: "My meek little Sara is a +remarkably interesting baby, with the finest possible skin, and large +blue eyes, and she smiles as if she were basking in a sunshine as mild +as moonlight of her own quiet happiness." Derwent, a less remarkable +but no less attractive child than his brother and sister (whom he was +destined long to survive), held an equal place in his father's +affections. Yet all these interwoven influences – a deep love of his +children and a sincere attachment to his wife, of whom, indeed, he +never ceased to speak with respect and regard – were as powerless as in +so many thousands of other cases they have been, to brace an enfeebled +will to the task of self-reform. In 1807 "respect and regard" had +manifestly taken the place of any warmer feeling in his mind. Later on +in the letter above quoted he says, "In less than a week I go down to +Ottery, with my children and their mother, from a sense of duty" +(<i>i.e.</i> to his brother, the Rev. George Coleridge, who had +succeeded his father as head master of the Ottery St. Mary Grammar +School) "as far as it affects myself, and from a promise made to Mrs. +Coleridge, as far as it affects her, and indeed of a debt of respect to +her for her many praiseworthy qualities." When husbands and wives take +to liquidating debts of this kind, and in this spirit, it is pretty +conclusive evidence that all other accounts between them are +closed.</p> + +<p>The letter from which these extracts have been taken was +written from Aisholt near Bridgewater, where Coleridge was then +staying, with his wife and children, as the guest of a Mr. Price; and +his friend Poole's description to Josiah Wedgwood of his state at that +time is significant as showing that some at least of his intimate +acquaintances had no suspicion of the real cause of his bodily and +mental disorders. "I admire him," Poole writes, "and pity him more than +ever. His information is much extended, the <i>great</i> qualities of +his mind heightened and better disciplined, but alas! his health is +much weaker, and his great failing, procrastination, or the +incapability of acting agreeably to his wish and will, much +increased."</p> + +<p>Whether the promised visit to Ottery St. Mary was ever paid there is +no record to show, but at the end of July 1807 we again hear of the +Coleridges at the house of a Mr. Chubb, a descendant of the Deist, at +Bridgewater; and here it was that De Quincey, after having endeavoured +in vain to run the poet to earth at Stowey, where he had been staying +with Mr. Poole, and whence he had gone to pay a short visit to Lord +Egmont, succeeded in obtaining an introduction to him. The +characteristic passage in which the younger man describes their +first meeting is too long for quotation, and it is to be hoped too well +known to need it: his vivid and acute criticism of Coleridge's +conversation may be more appropriately cited hereafter. His evidence as +to the conjugal relations of Coleridge and his wife has been already +discussed; and the last remaining point of interest about this +memorable introduction is the testimony which it incidentally affords +to De Quincey's genuine and generous instinct of hero-worship, and to +the depth of Coleridge's pecuniary embarrassments. The loan of £300, +which the poet's enthusiastic admirer insisted on Cottle's conveying to +him as from an unknown "young man of fortune who admired his talents," +should cover a multitude of De Quincey's subsequent sins. It was indeed +only upon Cottle's urgent representation that he had consented to +reduce the sum from £500 to £300. Nor does there seem any doubt of his +having honestly attempted to conceal his own identity with the nameless +benefactor, though, according to his own later account, he failed. +[<a href="#foot_6-1">1</a>]</p> + +<p>This occurred in November 1807, and in the previous month De +Quincey had been able to render Coleridge a minor service, while at the +same moment gratifying a long cherished wish of his own. Mrs. Coleridge +was about to return with her children to Keswick, but her husband, not +yet master of this £300 windfall, and undoubtedly at his wits' end for +money, was arranging for a course of lectures to be delivered at the +Royal Institution early in the ensuing year, and could not accompany +them. De Quincey offered accordingly to be their escort, and duly +conducted them to Wordsworth's house, thus making the acquaintance of +the second of his two great poetical idols within a few months of +paying his first homage to the other. In February 1808 Coleridge again +took up his abode in London at his old free quarters in the +<i>Courier</i> office, and began the delivery of a promised series of +sixteen lectures on Poetry and the Fine Arts. "I wish you could see +him," again writes Poole to Wedgwood, "you would pity and admire. He is +much improved, but has still less voluntary power than ever. Yet he is +so committed that I think he must deliver these lectures." Considering +that the authorities of the Royal Institution had agreed to pay him one +hundred guineas for delivering the lectures, he undoubtedly was more or +less "committed;" and his voluntary power, however small, might be +safely supposed to be equal to the task of fulfilling a contract. But +to get the lecturer into the lecture-room does not amount to much more +than bringing the horse to the water. You can no more make the one +drink than you can prevent the other from sending his audience away +thirsty. Coleridge's lectures on Poetry and the Fine Arts were +confused, ill arranged, and generally disappointing to the last degree. +Sometimes it was not even possible to bring the horse to the water. +Charles Lamb writes to Manning on the 20th of February 1808 (early days +indeed) that Coleridge had only delivered two lectures, and that though +"two more were intended, he did not come." De Quincey writes of +"dismissals of audience after audience, with pleas of illness; and on +many of his lecture-days I have seen all Albemarle Street closed by a +lock of carriages filled with women of distinction, until the servants +of the Institution or their own footmen advanced to the carriage-doors +with the intelligence that Mr. Coleridge had been suddenly taken ill." +Naturally there came a time when the "women of distinction" began to +tire of this treatment. "The plea, which at first had been received +with expressions of concern, repeated too often began to rouse disgust. +Many in anger, and some in real uncertainty whether it would not be +trouble thrown away, ceased to attend." And what De Quincey has to say +of the lectures themselves when they did by chance get delivered is no +less melancholy. "The lecturer's appearance," he says, "was generally +that of a man struggling with pain and over-mastering illness."</p> + +<p>"His lips were baked with feverish heat, and often black in colour; and +in spite of the water which he continued drinking through the whole +course of the lecture, he often seemed to labour under an almost paralytic +inability to raise the upper jaw from the lower" [<i>i.e.</i> I suppose +to move the lower jaw]. "In such a state it is clear that nothing could +save the lecture itself from reflecting his own feebleness and +exhaustion except the advantage of having been precomposed in some +happier mood. But that never happened: most unfortunately, he relied on +his extempore ability to carry him through. Now, had he been in +spirits, or had he gathered animation and kindled by his own emotion, +no written lecture could have been more effectual than one of his +unpremeditated colloquial harangues. But either he was depressed +originally below the point from which reascent was possible, or else +this reaction was intercepted by continual disgust from looking back +upon his own ill success; for assuredly he never once recovered that +free and eloquent movement of thought which he could command at any +time in a private company. The passages he read, moreover, in +illustrating his doctrines, were generally unhappily chosen, because +chosen at haphazard, from the difficulty of finding at a moment's +summons these passages which his purpose required. Nor do I remember +any that produced much effect except two or three which I myself put +ready marked into his hands among the <i>Metrical Romances</i>, edited +by Ritson. Generally speaking, the selections were as injudicious and +as inappropriate as they were ill delivered, for among Coleridge's +accomplishments good reading was not one. He had neither voice (so at +least I thought) nor management of voice. This defect is unfortunate in +a public lecturer, for it is inconceivable how much weight and +effectual pathos can be communicated by sonorous depth and melodious +cadence of the human voice to sentiments the most trivial; [<a href="#foot_6-2">2</a>] nor, on +the other hand, how the grandest are emasculated by a style of reading +which fails in distributing the lights and shadows of a musical +intonation. However, this defect chiefly concerned the immediate +impression; the most afflicting to a friend of Coleridge's was the +entire absence of his own peculiar and majestic intellect; no heart, no +soul, was in anything he said; no strength of feeling in recalling +universal truths, no power of originality or compass of moral +relations in his novelties, – all was a poor, faint reflection from +pearls once scattered on the highway by himself in the prodigality of +his early opulence – a mendicant dependence on the alms dropped from his +own overflowing treasury of happier times."</p> + +<p>Severe as is this censure of the lectures, there is unhappily no good +ground for disputing its substantial justice. And the inferences which +it suggests are only too painfully plain. One can well understand +Coleridge's being an ineffective lecturer, and no failure in this +respect, however conspicuous, would necessarily force us to the +hypothesis of physical disability. But a Coleridge who could no more +compose a lecture than he could deliver one-a Coleridge who could +neither write nor extemporise anything specially remarkable on a +subject so congenial to him as that of English poetry – must +assuredly have spent most of his time, whether in the lecture-room or +out of it, in a state of incapacity for sustained intellectual effort. +De Quincey's humorous account of the lecturer's shiftless untidy life +at the Courier office, and even the Rabelaisian quip which Charles +Lamb throws at it in the above-quoted letter to Manning, are +sufficient indications of his state at this time. "Oh, Charles," +he writes to Lamb, early in February, just before the course of +lectures was to begin, "I am very, very ill. <i>Vixi.</i>" The sad +truth is that, as seems to have been always the case with him when +living alone, he was during these months of his residence in London +more constantly and hopelessly under the dominion of opium than ever.</p> + +<blockquote style="font-variant: small-caps"><strong>Footnotes</strong></blockquote> + +<p><a name="foot_6-1"></a>1. "In a letter written by him (Coleridge) about fifteen years after +that time, I found that he had become aware of all the circumstances, +perhaps through some indiscretion of Mr. Cottle's." Perhaps, however, +no very great indiscretion on Mr. Cottle's part was needed to enable +Coleridge to trace the loan to so ardent a young admirer and disciple.</p> + +<p><a name="foot_6-2"></a>2. The justice of this criticism will be acknowledged by those many +persons whom Mr. Bright's great elocutionary skill has occasionally +deluded into imagining that the very commonplace verse which the famous +orator has been often known to quote with admiration is poetry of a +high order.</p> + + + +<a name="chap7"></a> +<h2>Chapter VII</h2> + +<blockquote>Return to the Lakes – From Keswick to Grasmere – With Wordsworth at Allan +Bank – The <i>Friend</i> – Quits the Lake country for ever.</blockquote> + +<p style="text-align: center">[1809-1810.]</p> + +<p>From the close of this series of lectures in the month of May 1808 +until the end of the year it is impossible to trace Coleridge's +movements or even to determine the nature of his occupation with any +approach to exactitude. The probability is, however, that he remained +in London at his lodgings in the <i>Courier</i> office, and that he +supported himself by rendering assistance in various ways to Mr. Daniel +Stuart. We know nothing of him, however, with certainty until we find +him once more at the Lakes in the early part of the year 1809, but not +in his own home. Wordsworth had removed from his former abode at +Grasmere to Allan Bank, a larger house some three-quarters of a mile +distant, and there Coleridge took up his residence, more, it would +seem, as a permanent inmate of his friend's house than as a guest. The +specific cause of this migration from Greta Hall to Allan Bank does not +appear, but all the accessible evidence, contemporary and subsequent, +seems to point to the probability that it was the result of a definite +break-up of Coleridge's own home. He continued, at any rate, to reside +in Wordsworth's house during the whole seven months of his editorship +of the <i>Friend</i>, a new venture in periodical literature which he +undertook at this period; and we shall see that upon its failure he did +not resume his residence at Greta Hall, but quitted the Lake country at +once and for ever.</p> + +<p>We need not take too literally Coleridge's declaration in the <i>Biographia +Literaria</i> that one "main object of his in starting the <i>Friend</i> +was to establish the philosophical distinction between the Reason and +the Understanding." Had this been so, or at least had the periodical +been actually conducted in conformity with any such purpose, even the +chagrined projector himself could scarcely have had the face to +complain, as Coleridge did very bitterly, of the reception accorded to +it by the public. The most unpractical of thinkers can hardly have +imagined that the "general reader" would "take in" a weekly metaphysical +journal published at a town in Cumberland. The <i>Friend</i> was not +quite so essentially hopeless an enterprise as that would have been; +but the accidents of mismanagement and imprudence soon made it, for +all practical purposes, sufficiently desperate. Even the forlorn +<i>Watchman</i>, which had been set on foot when Coleridge had fourteen +years' less experience of the world, was hardly more certainly +foredoomed. The first care of the founder of the <i>Friend</i> was to +select, as the place of publication, a town exactly twenty-eight miles +from his own abode – a distance virtually trebled, as De Quincey +observes, "by the interposition of Kirkstone, a mountain only to be +scaled by a carriage ascent of three miles, and so steep in parts that +without four horses no solitary traveller can persuade the neighbouring +innkeepers to convey him." Here, however, at Penrith, "by way of +purchasing intolerable difficulties at the highest price," Coleridge was +advised and actually persuaded to set up a printer, to buy and lay in a +stock of paper, types, etc., instead of resorting to some printer already +established at a nearer place – as, for instance, Kendal, which was ten +miles nearer, and connected with Coleridge's then place of residence by +a daily post, whereas at Penrith there was no post at all. Having thus +studiously and severely handicapped himself, the projector of the new +periodical set to work, upon the strength of what seems to have been in +great measure a fancy list of subscribers, to print and, so far as his +extraordinary arrangements permitted, to circulate his journal. With +<i>naïve</i> sententiousness he warns the readers of the <i>Biographia +Literaria</i> against trusting, in their own case, to such a guarantee +as he supposed himself to possess. "You cannot," he observes, "be certain +that the names on a subscription list have been put down by sufficient +authority; or, should that be ascertained, it still remains to be known +whether they were not extorted by some over-zealous friend's +importunity; whether the subscriber had not yielded his name merely +from want of courage to say no! and with the intention of dropping the +work as soon as possible." Thus out of a hundred patrons who had been +obtained for the <i>Friend</i> by an energetic canvasser, "ninety threw +up the publication before the fourth number without any notice, though +it was well known to them that in consequence of the distance and the +slowness and irregularity of the conveyance" [it is amusing to observe +the way in which Coleridge notes these drawbacks of his own creation as +though they were "the act of God"] "I was compelled to lay in a stock +of stamped paper for at least eight weeks beforehand, each sheet of +which stood me in fivepence previous to its arrival at my printer's; +though the subscription money was not to be received till the twenty-first week after the commencement of the work; and, lastly, though it +was in nine cases out of ten impracticable for me to receive the money +for two or three numbers without paying an equal sum for the postage."</p> + +<p>Enough appears in this undesignedly droll account of the +venture to show pretty clearly that, even had the <i>Friend</i> +obtained a reasonable measure of popularity at starting, the flagrant +defects in the methods of distributing and financing it must have +insured its early decease. But, as a matter of fact, it had no chance +of popularity from the outset. Its first number appeared on 1st August +1809, and Coleridge, writing to Southey on 20th October of the same +year, speaks of his "original apprehension" that the plan and execution +of the <i>Friend</i> is so utterly unsuitable to the public taste as to +preclude all rational hopes of its success. "Much," he continues, +"might have been done to have made the former numbers less so, by the +interposition of others written more expressly for general interest;" +and he promises to do his best in future to "interpose tales and whole +numbers of amusement, which will make the periods lighter and shorter." +Meanwhile he begs Southey to write a letter to the <i>Friend</i> in a +lively style, rallying its editor on "his Quixotism in expecting that +the public will ever pretend to understand his lucubrations or feel any +interest in subjects of such sad and unkempt antiquity." Southey, ever +good-natured, complied, even amid the unceasing press of his work, with +the request; and to the letter of lightly-touched satire which he +contributed to the journal he added a few private lines of friendly +counsel, strongly urging Coleridge to give two or three amusing +numbers, and he would hear of admiration on every side. "Insert too," +he suggested, "a few more poems – any that you have, except <i>Christabel</i>, +for that is of too much value. And write <i>now</i> that character of +Bonaparte, announced in former times for 'to-morrow, and to-morrow, +and to-morrow.'" It was too late, however, for good advice to be of +any avail: the <i>Friend</i> was past praying for. It lingered on +till its twenty-eighth number, and expired, unlike the Watchman, +without any farewell to its friends, in the third week of March 1810.</p> + +<p>The republication of this periodical, or rather selections +from it, which appeared in 1818, is hardly perhaps described with +justice in De Quincey's words as "altogether and absolutely a new +work." A reader can, at any rate, form a pretty fair estimate from it +of the style and probable public attractions of the original issue; and +a perusal of it, considered in its character as a bid for the patronage +of the general reader, is certainly calculated to excite an +astonishment too deep for words. We have, of course, to bear in mind +that the standard of the readable in our grandfathers' days was a more +liberal and tolerant one than it is in our own. In those days of +leisurely communications and slowly moving events there was relatively +at least a far larger public for a weekly issue of moral and +philosophical essays, under the name of a periodical, than it would be +found easy to secure at present, when even a monthly discourse upon +things in general requires Mr. Euskin's brilliancy of eloquence, +vivacity of humour, and perpetual charm of unexpectedness to carry it +off. Still the <i>Spectator</i> continued to be read in Coleridge's +day, and people therefore must have had before them a perpetual example +of what it was possible to do in the way of combining entertainment +with instruction. How, then, it could have entered into the mind of the +most sanguine projector to suppose that the <i>longueurs</i> and the +difficulty of the <i>Friend</i> would be patiently borne with for the +sake of the solid nutriment which it contained it is quite impossible +to understand. Even supposing that a weekly, whose avowed object was +"to aid in the formation of fixed principles in politics, morals, and +religion," could possibly be floated, even "with literary amusements +interspersed," it is evident that very much would depend upon the +character of these "amusements" themselves. In the republication of +1817 they appear under the heading of "landing-places." One of them +consists of a parallel between Voltaire and Erasmus, and between +Rousseau and Luther, founded, of course, on the respective attitudes of +the two pairs of personages to the Revolution and the Reformation. +Another at the end of the series consists of a criticism of, and +panegyric on, Sir Alexander Ball, the governor of Malta. Such are the +landing-places. But how should any reader, wearied with "for ever +climbing up the climbing wave" of Coleridge's eloquence, have found +rest or refreshment on one of these uncomfortable little sandbanks? It +was true that the original issue of the <i>Friend</i> contained +poetical contributions which do not appear in the republication; but +poetry in itself, or, at any rate, good poetry, is not a relief to the +overstrained faculties, and, even if it were, the relief would have +been provided at too infrequent intervals to affect the general result. +The fact is, however, that Coleridge's own theory of his duty as a +public instructor was in itself fatal to any hope of his venture +proving a commercial success. Even when entreated by Southey to lighten +the character of the periodical, he accompanies his admission of the +worldly wisdom of the advice with something like a protest against such +a departure from the severity of his original plan. His object, as he +puts it with much cogency from his own unpractical point of view – his +object being to teach men how to think on politics, religion, and +morals, and thinking being a very arduous and distasteful business to +the mass of mankind, it followed that the essays of the <i>Friend</i> +(and particularly the earlier essays, in which the reader required to +be "grounded" in his subject) could hardly be agreeable reading. With +perfect frankness indeed does he admit in his prospectus that he must +"submit to be thought dull by those who seek amusement only." He hoped, +however, as he says in one of his earlier essays, to become livelier as +he went on. "The proper merit of a foundation is its massiveness and +solidity. The conveniences and ornaments, the gilding and stucco-work, +the sunshine and sunny prospects, will come with the superstructure." +But the building, alas! was never destined to be completed, and the +architect had his own misgivings about the attractions even of the +completed edifice. "I dare not flatter myself that any endeavours of +mine, compatible with the duty I owe to the truth and the hope of +permanent utility, will render the <i>Friend</i> agreeable to the +majority of what is called the reading public. I never expected it. How +indeed could I when, etc." Yet, in spite of these professions, it is +clear from the prospectus that Coleridge believed in the possibility of +obtaining a public for the <i>Friend</i>. He says that "a motive for +honourable ambition was supplied by the fact that every periodical +paper of the kind now attempted, which had been conducted with zeal and +ability, was not only well received at the time, but has become +popular;" and he seems to regard it as a comparatively unimportant +circumstance that the <i>Friend</i> would be distinguished from "its +celebrated predecessors, the <i>Spectator</i> and the like," by the +"greater length of the separate essays, by their closer connection with +each other, and by the predominance of one object, and the common +bearing of all to one end." It was, of course, exactly this <i>plus</i> +of prolixity and <i>minus</i> of variety which lowered the sum of the +<i>Friend's</i> attractions so far below that of the <i>Spectator</i> +as to deprive the success of Addison of all its value as a +precedent.</p> + +<p>Nor is it easy to agree with the editor of the reprint of +1837 that the work, "with all its imperfections, is perhaps the most +vigorous" of its author's compositions. That there are passages in it +which impress us by their force of expression, as well as by subtlety +or beauty of thought, must of course be admitted. It was impossible to +a man of Coleridge's literary power that it should be otherwise. But +"vigorous" is certainly not the adjective which seems to me to suggest +itself to an impartial critic of these too copious disquisitions. +Making every allowance for their necessary elasticity of scope as being +designed to "prepare and discipline the student's moral and +intellectual being, not to propound dogmas and theories for his +adoption," it must, I think, be allowed that they are wanting in that +continuity of movement and co-ordination of parts which, as it seems to +me, enters into any intelligible definition of "vigour," as attributed +to a work of moral and political exposition considered as a whole. The +writer's discursiveness is too often and too vexatiously felt by the +reader to permit of the survival of any sense of theorematic unity in +his mind; he soon gives up all attempts at periodical measurement of +his own and his author's progress towards the prescribed goal of their +journey; and he resigns himself in this, as in so many other of +Coleridge's prose works, to a study of isolated and detached passages. +So treated, however, one may freely admit that the <i>Friend</i> is +fully worthy of the admiration with which Mr. H. N. Coleridge regarded +it. If not the most vigorous, it is beyond all comparison the most +characteristic of all his uncle's performances in this field of his +multiform activity. In no way could the peculiar pregnancy of +Coleridge's thoughts, the more than scholastic subtlety of his +dialectic, and the passionate fervour of his spirituality be more +impressively exhibited than by a well-made selection of <i>loci</i> +from the pages of the <i>Friend</i>.</p> + + + +<a name="chap8"></a> +<h2>Chapter VIII</h2> + +<blockquote>London again – Second recourse to journalism – The <i>Courier</i> +articles – The Shakespeare lectures – Production of <i>Remorse</i> – At +Bristol again as lecturer – Residence at Calne – Increasing ill health +and embarrassment – Retirement to Mr. Gillman's.</blockquote> + +<p style="text-align: center">[1810-1816.]</p> + +<p>The life led by Coleridge during the six years next ensuing is +difficult to trace, even in the barest outline; to give a detailed and +circumstantial account of it from any ordinarily accessible source of +information is impossible. Nor is it, I imagine, very probable that +even the most exhaustive search among whatever imprinted records may +exist in the possession of his friends would at all completely supply +the present lack of biographical material. For not only had it become +Coleridge's habit to disappear from the sight of his kinsmen and +acquaintances for long periods together; he had fallen almost wholly +silent also. They not only ceased to see him, but they ceased to hear +of him. Letters addressed to him, even on subjects of the greatest +importance, would remain for months unnoticed, and in many instances +would receive no answer at all. His correspondence during the next +half-dozen years must have been of the scantiest amount and the most +intermittent character, and a biographer could hope, therefore, for +but little aid in bridging over the large gaps in his knowledge of +this period, even if every extant letter written by Coleridge during +its continuance were to be given to the world.</p> + +<p>Such light, too, as is retrospectively thrown upon it by Coleridge's +correspondence of a later date is of the most fitful description, – +scarcely more than serves, in fact, for the rendering of darkness +visible. Even the sudden and final departure from the Lakes it leaves +involved in as much obscurity as ever. Writing to Mr. Thomas Allsop +[<a href="#foot_8-1">1</a>] from Ramsgate twelve years afterwards (8th October 1822) he says +that he "counts four grasping and griping sorrows in his past life." +The first of these "was when" [no date given] "the vision of a happy +home sank for ever, and it became impossible for me longer even to +hope for domestic happiness under the name of husband." That is plain +enough on the whole, though it still leaves us in some uncertainty as +to whether the "sinking of the vision" was as gradual as the +estrangement between husband and wife, or whether he refers to some +violent rupture of relations with Mrs. Coleridge, possibly +precipitating his departure from the Lakes. If soothe second "griping +and grasping sorrow" followed very quickly on the first, for he says +that it overtook him "on the night of his arrival from Grasmere with +Mr. and Mrs. Montagu;" while in the same breath and paragraph, and as +though undoubtedly referring to the same thing, he speaks of the +"destruction of a friendship of fifteen years when, just at the moment +of Tenner and Curtis's (the publishers) bankruptcy" (by which +Coleridge was a heavy loser, but which did not occur till seven years +afterwards), somebody indicated by seven asterisks and possessing an +income of £1200 a-year, was "totally transformed into baseness." There +is certainly not much light here, any more than in the equally +enigmatical description of the third sorrow as being "in some sort +included in the second," so that "what the former was to friendship +the latter was to a still more inward bond." The truth is, that all +Coleridge's references to himself in his later years are shrouded in a +double obscurity. One veil is thrown over them by his deliberate +preference for abstract and mystical forms of expression, and another +perhaps by that kind of shameful secretiveness which grows upon all +men who become the slaves of concealed indulgences, and which often +displays itself on occasions when it has no real object to gain of any +kind whatever.</p> + +<p>Thus much only we know, that on reaching London in the summer of 1810 +Coleridge became the guest of the Montagus, and that, after some +months' residence with them, he left as the immediate result of some +difference with his host which was never afterwards composed. Whether +it arose from the somewhat trivial cause to which De Quincey has, +admittedly upon the evidence of "the learned in literary scandal," +referred it, it is now impossible to say. But at some time or other, +towards the close probably of 1810, or in the early months of 1811, +Coleridge quitted Mr. Montagu's house for that of Mr. John Morgan, a +companion of his early Bristol days, and a common friend of his and +Southey's; and here, at No. 7 Portland Place, Hammersmith, he was +residing when, for the second time, he resolved to present himself to +the London public in the capacity of lecturer. His services were on +this occasion engaged by the London Philosophical Society, at Crane +Court, Fleet Street, and their prospectus announced that on Monday, +18th November, Mr. Coleridge would commence "a course of lectures on +Shakspeare and Milton, in illustration of the principles of poetry and +their application, on grounds of criticism, to the most popular works +of later English poets, those of the living included. After an +introductory lecture on false criticism (especially in poetry) and on +its causes, two-thirds of the remaining course," continues the +prospectus, "will be assigned, 1st, to a philosophical analysis and +explanation of all the principal characters of our great dramatists, +as Othello, Falstaff, Richard the Third, Lago, Hamlet, etc., and to a +critical comparison of Shakspeare in respect of diction, imagery, +management of the passions, judgment in the construction of his +dramas – in short, of all that belongs to him as a poet, and as a +dramatic poet, with his contemporaries or immediate successors, +Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Ford, Massinger, and in the endeavour +to determine which of Shakespeare's merits and defects are common to +him, with other writers of the same age, and what remain peculiar to +his genius."</p> + +<p>A couple of months before the commencement of this course, viz. in +September 1811, Coleridge seems to have entered into a definite +journalistic engagement with his old editor, Mr. Daniel Stuart, then +the proprietor of the <i>Courier</i>. It was not, however, his first +connection with that journal. He had already published at least one +piece of verse in its columns, and two years before, while the +<i>Friend</i> was still in existence, he had contributed to it a +series of letters on the struggle of the Spaniards against their +French invaders. In these, as though to show that under the ashes of +his old democratic enthusiasm still lived its wonted fires, and that +the inspiration of a popular cause was only needed to reanimate them, +we find, with less of the youthful lightness of touch and agility of +movement, a very near approach to the vigour of his early journalistic +days. Whatever may be thought of the historic value of the parallel +which he institutes between the struggle of the Low Countries against +their tyrant, and that of the Peninsula against its usurping +conqueror, it is worked out with remarkable ingenuity of completeness. +Whole pages of the letters are radiant with that steady flame of +hatred which, ever since the hour of his disillusionment, had glowed +in his breast at the name and thought of Bonaparte; and whenever he +speaks of the Spaniards, of Spanish patriotism, of the Spanish Cortes, +we see that the names of "the people," of "freedom," of "popular +assembly," have some of their old magic for him still. The following +passage is almost pathetic in its reminder of the days of 1792, before +that modern Leonidas, the young French Republic, had degenerated into +the Xerxes of the Empire.</p> + +<p>"The power which raised up, established, and enriched the Dutch +republic, – the same mighty power is no less at work in the present +struggle of the Spanish nation, a power which mocks the calculations +of ordinary statecraft too subtle to be weighed against it, and mere +outward brute force too different from it to admit of comparison. A +power as mighty in the rational creation as the element of electricity +in the material world; and, like that element, infinite in its +affinities, infinite in its mode of action, combining the most +discordant natures, fixing the most volatile, and arming the sluggish +vapour of the marsh with arrows of fire; working alike in silence and +in tempest, in growth and in destruction; now contracted to an +individual soul, and now, as in a moment, dilating itself over a whole +nation! Am I asked what this mighty power may be, and wherein it +exists? If we are worthy of the fame which we possess as the +countrymen of Hampden, Russell, and Algernon Sidney, we shall find the +answer in our own hearts. It is the power of the insulted free-will, +steadied by the approving conscience and struggling against brute +force and iniquitous compulsion for the common rights of human nature, +brought home to our inmost souls by being, at the same time, the +rights of our betrayed, insulted, and bleeding country."</p> + +<p>And as this passage recalls the most striking characteristics of his +earlier style, so may its conclusion serve as a fair specimen of the +calmer eloquence of his later manner: – </p> + +<p>"It is a painful truth, sir, that these men who appeal most to facts, +and pretend to take them for their exclusive guide, are the very +persons who most disregard the light of experience when it refers them +to the mightiness of their own inner nature, in opposition to those +forces which they can see with their eyes, and reduce to figures upon +a slate. And yet, sir, what is history for the greater and more useful +part but a voice from the sepulchres of our forefathers, assuring us, +from their united experience, that our spirits are as much stronger +than our bodies as they are nobler and more permanent? The historic +muse appears in her loftiest character as the nurse of Hope. It is her +appropriate praise that her records enable the magnanimous to silence +the selfish and cowardly by appealing to actual events for the +information of these truths which they themselves first learned from +the surer oracle of their own reason."</p> + +<p>But this reanimation of energy was but a transient phenomenoa It did +not survive the first freshness of its exciting cause. The Spanish +insurrection grew into the Peninsular war, and though the glorious +series of Wellington's victories might well, one would think, have +sustained the rhetorical temperature at its proper pitch, it failed to +do so. Or was it, as the facts appear now and then to suggest, that +Coleridge at Grasmere or Keswick-Coleridge in the inspiring (and +restraining) companionship of close friends and literary compeers – was +an altogether different man from Coleridge in London, alone with his +thoughts and his opium? The question cannot be answered with +confidence, and the fine quality of the lectures on Shakespeare is +sufficient to show that, for some time, at any rate, after his final +migration to London, his critical faculty retained its full vigour. +But it is beyond dispute that his regular contributions to the +<i>Courier</i> in 1811-12 are not only vastly inferior to his articles +of a dozen years before in the <i>Morning Post</i> but fall sensibly +short of the level of the letters of 1809, from which extract has just +been made. Their tone is spiritless, and they even lack distinction of +style. Their very subjects, and the mode of treating them, appear to +show a change in Coleridge's attitude towards public affairs if not in +the very conditions of his journalistic employment. They have much +more of the character of newspaper hack-work than his earlier +contributions. He seems to have been, in many instances, set to write +a mere report, and often a rather dry and mechanical report of this or +the other Peninsular victory. He seldom or never discusses the +political situation, as his wont had been, <i>au large</i>; and in +place of broad statesmanlike reflection on the scenes and actors in +the great world-drama then in progress, we meet with too much of that +sort of criticism on the consistency and capacity of "our +contemporary, the <i>Morning Chronicle</i>," which had less attraction, +it may be suspected, even for the public of its own day than +for the journalistic profession, while for posterity, of course, +it possesses no interest at all. The series of contributions extends +from September of 1811 until April of the following year, and appears +to have nearly come to a premature and abrupt close in the +intermediate July, when an article written by Coleridge in strong +opposition to the proposed reinstatement of the Duke of York in the +command-in-chief was, by ministerial influence, suppressed before +publication. This made Coleridge, as his daughter informs us on the +authority of Mr. Crabb Kobinson, "very uncomfortable," and he was +desirous of being engaged on another paper. He wished to be connected +with the <i>Times</i>, and "I spoke," says Mr. Eobinson, "with Walter +on the subject, but the negotiation failed."</p> + +<p>With the conclusion of the lectures on Shakespeare, and the loss of +the stimulus, slight as it then was to him, of regular duties and +recurring engagements, Coleridge seems to have relapsed once more into +thoroughly desultory habits of work. The series of aphorisms and +reflections which he contributed in 1812 to Southey's <i>Omniana</i>, +witty, suggestive, profound as many of them are, must not of course be +referred to the years in which they were given to the world. They +belong unquestionably to the order of <i>marginalia</i>, the scattered +notes of which De Quincey speaks with not extravagant admiration, and +which, under the busy pencil of a commentator always indefatigable in +the <i>strenua inertia</i> of reading, had no doubt accumulated in +considerable quantities over a long course of years.</p> + +<p>The disposal, however, of this species of literary material could +scarcely have been a source of much profit to him, and Coleridge's +difficulties of living must by this time have been growing acute. His +pension from the Wedgwoods had been assigned, his surviving son has +stated, to the use of his family, and even this had been in the +previous year reduced by half. "In Coleridge's neglect," observes Miss +Meteyard, "of his duties to his wife, his children, and his friends, +must be sought the motives which led Mr. Wedgwood in 1811 to withdraw +his share of the annuity. An excellent, even over-anxious father, he +was likely to be shocked at a neglect which imposed on the generosity +of Southey, himself heavily burdened, those duties which every man of +feeling and honour proudly and even jealously guards as his own.... +The pension of £150 per annum had been originally granted with the +view to secure Coleridge independence and leisure while he effected +some few of his manifold projects of literary work. But ten years had +passed, and these projects were still <i>in nubibus</i> – even the life +of Leasing, even the briefer memoir of Thomas Wedgwood; and gifts so +well intentioned, had as it were, ministered to evil rather than to +good." We can hardly wonder at the step, however we may regret it; and +if one of the reasons adduced in defence of it savours somewhat of the +fallacy known as <i>... non causé, pro causé</i>, we may perhaps +attribute that rather to the maladroitness of Miss Meteyard's advocacy +than to the weakness of Mr. Wedgwood's logic. The fact, however, that +this "excellent, even over-anxious father" was shocked at a neglect +which imposed a burden on the generosity of Southey, is hardly a just +ground for cutting off one of the supplies by which that burden was +partially relieved. As to the assignment of the pension to the family, +it is impossible to question what has been positively affirmed by an +actual member of that family, the Rev. Derwent Coleridge himself; +though, when he adds that not only was the school education of both the +sons provided from this source, but that through his (Coleridge's) +influence they were both sent to college, his statement is at variance, +as will be presently seen, with an authority equal to his own.</p> + +<p>In 1812, at any rate, we may well believe that Coleridge's necessities +had become pressing, and the timely service then rendered to him by +Lord Byron may have been suggested almost as much by a knowledge of +his needs as by admiration for the dramatic merits of his long-since +rejected tragedy. <i>Osorio's</i> time had at any rate come. The +would-be fratricide changed his name to Ordonio, and ceased to stand +sponsor to the play, which was rechristened <i>Remorse</i>, and +accepted at last, upon Byron's recommendation, by the committee of +Drury Lane Theatre, the playhouse at whose doors it had knocked vainly +fifteen years before it was performed there for the first time on the +23d of January 1813. The prologue and epilogue, without which in those +times no gentleman's drama was accounted complete, was written, the +former by Charles Lamb, the latter by the author himself. It obtained +a brilliant success on its first representation, and was honoured with +what was in those days regarded as the very respectable run of twenty +nights.</p> + +<p>The success, however, which came so opportunely for his material +necessities was too late to produce any good effect upon Coleridge's +mental state. But a month after the production of his tragedy we find +him writing in the most dismal strain of hypochondria to Thomas Poole. +The only pleasurable sensation which the success of <i>Remorse</i> had +given him was, he declares, the receipt of his friend's "heart-engendered lines" of congratulation. "No grocer's apprentice, after +his first month's permitted riot, was ever sicker of figs and raisins +than I of hearing about the <i>Remorse</i>. The endless rat-a-tat-tat +at our black-and-blue bruised doors, and my three master-fiends, +proof-sheets, letters, and – worse than these – invitations to large +dinners, which I cannot refuse without offence and imputation of +pride, etc., oppress me so much that my spirits quite sink under it. I +have never seen the play since the first night. It has been a good +thing for the theatre. They will get eight or ten thousand pounds by +it, and I shall get more than by all my literary labours put together + – nay, thrice as much." So large a sum of money as this must have +amounted to should surely have lasted him for years; but the +particular species of intemperance to which he was now hopelessly +enslaved is probably the most costly of all forms of such indulgence, +and it seems pretty evident that the proceeds of his theatrical +<i>coup</i> were consumed in little more than a year.</p> + +<p>Early in 1814, at any rate, Coleridge once more returned to his old +occupation of lecturer, and this time not in London, but in the scene +of his first appearance in that capacity. The lectures which he +proposed to deliver at Bristol were, in fact, a repetition of the +course of 1811-12; but the ways of the lecturer, to judge from an +amusing story recorded by Cottle, more nearly resembled his +proceedings in 1808. A "brother of Mr. George Cumberland," who +happened to be his fellow-traveller to Bristol on this occasion, +relates that before the coach started Coleridge's attention was +attracted by a little Jew boy selling pencils, with whom he entered +into conversation, and with whose superior qualities he was so +impressed as to declare that "if he had not an important engagement at +Bristol he would stay behind to provide some better condition for the +lad." The coach having started, "the gentleman" (for his name was +unknown to the narrator of the incident) "talked incessantly and in a +most entertaining way for thirty miles out of London, and, afterwards, +with little intermission till they reached Marlborough," when he +discovered that a lady in the coach with him was a particular friend +of his; and on arriving at Bath he quitted the coach declaring that he +was determined not to leave her till he had seen her safe to her +brother's door in North Wales. This was the day fixed for the delivery +of Coleridge's first lecture. Two or three days afterwards, having +completed his <i>détour</i> by North Wales, he arrived at Bristol: +another day was fixed for the commencement of the course, and +Coleridge then presented himself an hour after the audience had taken +their seats. The "important engagement" might be broken, it seems, for +a mere whim, though not for a charitable impulse – a distinction +testifying to a mixture of insincerity and unpunctuality not pleasant +to note as an evidence of the then state of Coleridge's emotions and +will.</p> + +<p>Thus inauspiciously commenced, there was no reason why the Bristol +lectures of 1814 should be more successful than the London Institution +lectures of 1808; nor were they, it appears, in fact. They are said to +have been "sparsely attended," – no doubt owing to the natural +unwillingness of people to pay for an hour's contemplation of an empty +platform; and their pecuniary returns in consequence were probably +insignificant. Coleridge remained in Bristol till the month of August, +when he returned to London.</p> + +<p>The painful task of tracing his downward course is now almost +completed. In the middle of this year he touched the lowest point of +his descent. Cottle, who had a good deal of intercourse with him by +speech and letter in 1814, and who had not seen him since 1807, was +shocked by his extreme prostration, and then for the first time +ascertained the cause. "In 1814," he says in his <i>Recollections</i>, +"S. T. C. had been long, very long, in the habit of taking from two +quarts of laudanum a week to a pint a day, and on one occasion he had +been known to take in the twenty-four hours a whole quart of laudanum. +The serious expenditure of money resulting from this habit was the +least evil, though very great, and must have absorbed all the produce +of his writings and lectures and the liberalities of his friends." +Cottle addressed to him a letter of not very delicate remonstrance on +the subject, to which Coleridge replied in his wontedly humble strain.</p> + +<p>There is a certain Pharisaism about the Bristol poet-publisher which +renders it necessary to exercise some little caution in the acceptance +of his account of Coleridge's condition; but the facts, from whatever +source one seeks them, appear to acquit him of any exaggeration in his +summing up of the melancholy matter. "A general impression," he says, +"prevailed on the minds of Coleridge's friends that it was a desperate +case, that paralysed all their efforts; that to assist Coleridge with +money which, under favourable circumstances would have been most +promptly advanced, would now only enlarge his capacity to obtain the +opium which was consuming him. We merely knew that Coleridge had +retired with his friend, Mr. John Morgan, to a small house at Calne in +Wiltshire."</p> + +<p>It must have been at Calne, then, that Coleridge composed the series +of "Letters to Mr. Justice Fletcher concerning his charge to the Grand +Jury of the county of Wexford, at the summer Assizes in 1814," which +appeared at intervals in the <i>Courier</i> between 20th September and +10th December of this year. Their subject, a somewhat injudiciously +animated address to the aforesaid Grand Jury on the subject of the +relations between Catholicism and Protestantism in Ireland, was well +calculated to stimulate the literary activity of a man who always took +something of the keen interest of the modern Radical in the eternal +Irish question; and the letters are not wanting either in +argumentative force or in grave impressiveness of style. But their lack +of spring and energy as compared with Coleridge's earlier work in +journalism is painfully visible throughout.</p> + +<p>Calne, it is to be supposed, was still Coleridge's place of abode when +Southey (17th October) wrote Cottle that letter which appears in his +<i>Correspondence</i>, and which illustrates with such sad completeness +the contrast between the careers of the two generous, romantic, +brilliant youths who had wooed their wives together – and between the +fates, one must add, of the two sisters who had listened to their +wooing – eighteen years before: a letter as honourable to the writer as +it is the reverse to its subject. "Can you," asks Southey, "tell me +anything of Coleridge? A few lines of introduction for a son of Mr.— +of St. James's, in your city, are all that we have received from him +since I saw him last September twelvemonth (1813) in town. The children +being thus left entirely to chance, I have applied to his brothers at +Ottey (Ottery?) concerning them, and am in hopes through their means +and the assistance of other friends of sending Hartley to college. +Lady Beaumont has promised £30 a year for the purpose, and Poole £10. +I wrote to Coleridge three or four months ago, telling him that unless +he took some steps in providing for this object I must make the +application, and required his answer within a given term of three +weeks. He received the letter, and in his note by Mr.— promised to +answer it, but he has never taken any further notice of it. I have +acted with the advice of Wordsworth. The brothers, as I expected, +promise their concurrence, and I daily expect a letter stating to what +extent they will contribute." With this letter before him an impartial +biographer can hardly be expected to adopt the theory which has +commended itself to the filial piety of the Rev. Derwent Coleridge – +namely, that it was through the father's "influence" that the sons +were sent to college. On a plain matter of fact such as this, one may +be permitted, without indelicacy, to uphold the conclusions compelled +by the evidence. Such expressions of opinion, on the other hand, as +that Coleridge's "separation from his family, brought about and +continued through the force of circumstances over which he had far +less control than has been commonly supposed, was in fact nothing else +but an ever-prolonged absence;" and that "from first to last he took +an affectionate, it may be said a passionate, interest in the welfare +of his children" – such expressions of mere opinion as these it may be +proper enough to pass by in respectful silence.</p> + +<p>The following year brought with it no improvement in the embarrassed +circumstances, no reform of the disordered life. Still domiciled with +Mr. Morgan at Calne, the self-made sufferer writes to Cottle: "You +will wish to know something of myself. In health I am not worse than +when at Bristol I was best; yet fluctuating, yet unhappy, in +circumstances poor indeed! I have collected my scattered and my +manuscript poems sufficient to make one volume. Enough I have to make +another. But, till the latter is finished, I cannot, without great loss +of character, publish the former, on account of the arrangement, +besides the necessity of correction. For instance, I earnestly wish to +begin the volumes with what has never been seen by any, however few, +such as a series of odes on the different sentences of the Lord's +Prayer, and, more than all this, to finish my greater work on +'Christianity considered as philosophy, and as the only philosophy.'" +Then follows a request for a loan of forty pounds on the security of +the MSS., an advance which Cottle declined to make, though he sent +Coleridge "some smaller temporary relief." The letter concludes with a +reference to a project for taking a house and receiving pupils to +hoard and instruct, which Cottle appeared to consider the crowning +"degradation and ignominy of all."</p> + +<p>A few days later we find Lord Byron again coming to Coleridge's +assistance with a loan of a hundred pounds and words of counsel and +encouragement. Why should not the author of Remorse repeat his success +I "In Kean," writes Byron, "there is an actor worthy of expressing the +thoughts of the character which you have every power of embodying, and +I cannot but regret that the part of Ordonio was disposed of before +his appearance at Drury Lane. We have had nothing to be mentioned in +the same breath with Remorse for very many years, and I should think +that the reception of that play was sufficient to encourage the +highest hopes of author and audience." The advice was followed, and +the drama of Zapolya was the result. It is a work of even less dramatic +strength than its predecessor, and could scarcely, one thinks, have +been as successful with an audience. It was not, however, destined to +see the footlights. Before it had passed the tribunal of the Drury +Lane Committee it had lost the benefit of Byron's patronage through +the poet's departure from England, and the play was rejected by Mr. +Douglas Kinnaird, the then reader for the theatre, who assigned, +according to Mr. Gillman, "some ludicrous objections to the +metaphysics." Before leaving England, however, Byron rendered a last, +and, as the result proved, a not unimportant service to his brother-poet. He introduced him to Mr. Murray, who, in the following year, +undertook the publication of <i>Christabel</i> – the most successful, +in the sense of the most popular, of all its author's productions in +verse.</p> + +<p>With the coming of spring in the following year that dreary story of +slow self-destruction, into which the narrative of Coleridge's life +from the age of thirty to that of forty-five resolves itself, was +brought to a close. Coleridge had at last perceived that his only hope +of redemption lay in a voluntary submission of his enfeebled will to +the control of others, and he had apparently just enough strength of +volition to form and execute the necessary resolve. He appears, in the +first instance, to have consulted a physician of the name of Adams, +who, on the 9th of April 1816, put himself in communication with Mr. +Gillman of Highgate. "A very learned, but in one respect an +unfortunate gentleman, has," he wrote, "applied to me on a singular +occasion. He has for several years been in the habit of taking large +quantities of opium. For some time past he has been in vain +endeavouring to break himself of it. It is apprehended his friends are +not firm enough, from a dread lest he should suffer by suddenly +leaving it off, though he is conscious of the contrary, and has +proposed to me to submit himself to any regimen, however severe. With +this view he wishes to fix himself in the house of some medical +gentleman who will have the courage to refuse him any laudanum, and +under whose assistance, should he be the worse for it, he may be +relieved." Would such a proposal, inquires the writer, be absolutely +inconsistent with Mr. Gillman's family arrangements? He would not, he +adds, have proposed it "but on account of the great importance of the +character as a literary man. His communicative temper will make his +society very interesting as well as useful." Mr. Gillman's +acquaintance with Dr. Adams was but slight, and he had had no previous +intention of receiving an inmate into his house. But the case very +naturally interested him; he sought an interview with Dr. Adams, and it +was agreed that the latter should drive Coleridge to Highgate the +following evening. At the appointed hour, however, Coleridge presented +himself alone, and, after spending the evening at Mr. Gillman's, left +him, as even in his then condition he left most people who met him for +the first time, completely captivated by the amiability of his manners +and the charm of his conversation. The next day Mr. Gillman received +from him a letter, finally settling the arrangement to place himself +under the doctor's care, and concluding with the following pathetic +passage:</p> + +<p>"And now of myself. My ever wakeful reason and the keenness of my +moral feelings will secure you from all unpleasant circumstances +connected with me save only one, viz. the evasion of a specific +madness. You will never hear anything but truth from me; prior habits +render it out of my power to tell an untruth, but, unless carefully +observed, I dare not promise that I should not, with regard to this +detested poison, be capable of acting one. Not sixty hours have yet +passed without my having taken laudanum, though, for the last week, +comparatively trifling doses. I have full belief that your anxiety +need not be extended beyond the first week, and for the first week, I +shall not, must not, be permitted to leave your house, unless with +you; delicately or indelicately, this must be done, and both the +servants, and the assistant, must receive absolute commands from you. +The stimulus of conversation suspends the terror that haunts my mind; +but, when I am alone, the horrors I have suffered from laudanum, the +degradation, the blighted utility, almost overwhelm me. If (as I feel +for the _first time_ a soothing confidence that it will prove) I +should leave you restored to my moral and bodily health, it is not +myself only that will love and honour you; every friend I have (and, +thank God! in spite of this wretched vice I have many and warm ones, +who were friends of my youth, and have never deserted me) will thank +you with reverence. I have taken no notice of your kind apologies. If +I could not be comfortable in your house and with your family, I +should deserve to be miserable."</p> + +<p>This letter was written on a Saturday, and on the following Monday +Coleridge presented himself at Mr. Gillman's, bringing in his hand the +proof – sheets of <i>Christabel</i>, now printed for the first time. He +had looked, as the letter just quoted shows, with a "soothing +confidence" to leaving his retreat at some future period in a restored +condition of moral and bodily health; and as regards the restoration, +his confidence was in a great measure justified. But the friendly doors +which opened to receive him on this 15th of April 1816, were destined +to close only upon his departing bier. Under the watchful and almost +reverential care of this well-chosen guardian, sixteen years of +comparatively quiet and well-ordered life, of moderate but effective +literary activity, and of gradual though never complete emancipation +from his fatal habit, were reserved to him. He had still, as we shall +see, to undergo certain recurrences of restlessness and renewals of +pecuniary difficulty; his shattered health was but imperfectly and +temporarily repaired; his "shaping spirit of imagination" could not and +did not return; his transcendental broodings became more and more the +"habit of his soul." But henceforth he recovers for us a certain +measure of his long-lost dignity, and a figure which should always +have been "meet for the reverence of the hearth" in the great +household of English literature, but which had far too long and too +deeply sunk below it, becomes once more a worthy and even a venerable +presence. At evening-time it was light.</p> + +<blockquote style="font-variant: small-caps"><strong>Footnotes</strong></blockquote> + +<p><a name="foot_8-1"></a>1. Coleridge made the acquaintance of this gentleman, who became his +enthusiastic disciple, in 1818. His chief interest for us is the fact +that for the next seven years he was Coleridge's correspondent. +Personally, he was a man of little judgment or critical discrimination, +and his sense of the ridiculous may be measured by the following +passage. Speaking of the sweetness of Charles Lamb's smile, he says +that "there is still one man living, a stockbroker, who has that +smile," and adds: "To those who wish to see the only thing left on +earth, <i>if it is still left</i>, of Lamb, his best and most beautiful +remain – his smile, I will indicate its possessor, Mr.— of Throgmorton +Street." How the original "possessor" of this apparently assignable +security would have longed to "feel Mr. Allsop's head"!</p> + + + +<a name="chap9"></a> +<h2>Chapter IX</h2> + +<blockquote>Life at Highgate-Renewed activity-Publications and re-publications – The +<i>Biographia Literaria</i> – The lectures of 1818-Coleridge as a +Shakespearian critic.</blockquote> + +<p style="text-align: center">[1816-1818.]</p> + +<p>The results of the step which Coleridge had just taken became speedily +visible in more ways than one, and the public were among the first to +derive benefit from it. For not only was he stimulated to greater +activity of production, but his now more methodical way of life gave +him time and inclination for that work of arrangement and preparation +for the press which, distasteful to most writers, was no doubt +especially irksome to him, and thus insured the publication of many +pieces which otherwise might never have seen the light. The appearance +of <i>Christabel</i> was, as we have said, received with signal marks of +popular favour, three editions being called for and exhausted in the +same year. In 1816 there appeared also The Statesman's Manual; or the +Bible the best guide to Political Skill and Foresight: a Lay Sermon +addressed to the higher classes of Society, with an Appendix containing +Comments and Essays connected with the Study of the Inspired Writings; +in 1817, another <i>Lay Sermon addressed to the higher and middle +classes on the existing distresses and discontents;</i> and in the same +year followed the most important publication of this period, the +<i>Biographia Literaria</i>.</p> + +<p>In 1817, too, it was that Coleridge at last made his long-meditated +collection and classification of his already published poems, and that +for the first time something approaching to a complete edition of the +poet's works was given to the world. The <i>Sibylline Leaves</i>, as +this reissue was called, had been intended to be preceded by another +volume of verse, and "accordingly on the printer's signatures of every +sheet we find Vol. II, appearing." Too characteristically, however, +the scheme was abandoned, and Volume II. emerged from the press +without any Volume I. to accompany it. The drama of <i>Zapolya</i> +followed in the same year, and proved more successful with the public +than with the critic of Drury Lane. The "general reader" assigned no +"ludicrous objections to its metaphysics;" on the contrary, he took +them on trust, as his generous manner is, and <i>Zapolya</i>, +published thus as a Christmas tale, became so immediately popular +that two thousand copies were sold in six weeks. In the year 1818 +followed the three-volume selection of essays from the <i>Friend</i>, +a reissue to which reference has already been made. With the exception +of <i>Christabel</i>, however, all the publications of these three +years unfortunately proceeded from the house of Gale and Fenner, a +firm which shortly afterwards became bankrupt; and Coleridge thus +lost all or nearly all of the profits of their sale.</p> + +<p>The most important of the new works of this period was, as +has been said, the <i>Biographia Literaria</i>, or, to give it its +other title, <i>Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life and +Opinions</i>. Its interest, however, is wholly critical and +illustrative; as a narrative it would be found extremely disappointing +and probably irritating by the average reader. With the exception of +one or two incidental disclosures, but little biographical information +is to be derived from it which is not equally accessible from sources +independent of the author; and the almost complete want of sequence and +arrangement renders it a very inconvenient work of reference even for +these few biographical details. Its main value is to be found in the +contents of seven chapters, from the fourteenth to the twentieth; but +it is not going too far to say that, in respect of these, it is +literally priceless. No such analysis of the principles of poetry – no +such exact discrimination of what was sound in the modern "return-to-nature" movement from what was false – has ever been accomplished by any +other critic, or with such admirable completeness by this consummate +critic at any other time. Undoubtedly it is not of the light order of +reading; none, or very little, of Coleridge's prose is. The whole of +chapter xv., for instance, in which the specific elements of "poetic +power" are "distinguished from general talent determined to poetic +composition by accidental motives," requires a close and sustained +effort of the attention, but those who bestow it will find it amply re-paid. I know of no dissertation conceived and carried out in terms of +the abstract which in the result so triumphantly justifies itself upon +application to concrete cases, As regards the question of poetic +expression, and the laws by which its true form is determined, +Coleridge's analysis is, it seems to me, final. I cannot, at least, +after the most careful reflection upon it, conceive it as being other +than the absolutely last word on the subject. Reasoning and +illustration are alike so convincing that the reader, like the +contentious student who listened unwillingly to his professor's +demonstration of the first proposition of Euclid, is compelled to +confess that "he has nothing to reply." To the judicious admirer of +Wordsworth, to every one who, while recognising Wordsworth's +inestimable services to English literature as the leader of the +naturalist reaction in poetry, has yet been vaguely conscious of the +defect in his poetic theory, and very keenly conscious of the vices of +his poetic practice, – to all such persons it must be a profound relief +and satisfaction to be guided as unerringly as Coleridge guides them to +the "parting of the ways" of truth and falsity in Wordsworth's +doctrines, and to be enabled to perceive that nothing which has +offended him in that poet's thought and diction has any real connection +with whatever in the poet's principles has commanded his assent. There +is no one who has ever felt uneasy under the blasphemies of the enemy +but must entertain deep gratitude for so complete a discharge as +Coleridge has procured him from the task of defending such lines as</p> + +<p> "And I have travelled far as Hull to see + What clothes he might have left or other property."</p> + +<p>Defend them indeed the ordinary reader probably would not, preferring +even the abandonment of his theory to a task so humiliating. But the +theory has so much of truth and value in it that the critic who has +redeemed it from the discredit of Wordsworth's misapplications of it is +entitled to the thanks of every friend of simplicity, who is at the +same time an enemy of bathos. There is no longer any reason to treat +the deadly commonplaces, amid which we toil through so many pages of +the <i>Excursion</i>, as having any true theoretic affinity with its +but too occasional majestic interludes. The smooth square-cut blocks of +prose which insult the natural beauty of poetic rock and boulder even +in such a scene of naked moorland grandeur as that of <i>Resolution and +Independence</i> are seen and shown to be the mere intruders which we +have all felt them to be. To the Wordsworthian, anxious for a full +justification of the faith that is in him, the whole body of +Coleridge's criticism on his friend's poetry in the <i>Biographia +Literaria</i> may be confidently recommended. The refutation of what is +untenable in Wordsworth's theory, the censure pronounced upon certain +characteristics of his practice, are made all the more impressive by +the tone of cordial admiration which distinguishes every personal +reference to the poet himself, and by the unfailing discrimination with +which the critic singles out the peculiar beauties of his poetry. No +finer selection of finely characteristic Wordsworthian passages could +perhaps have been made than those which Coleridge has quoted in +illustration of his criticisms in the eighteenth and two following +chapters of the <i>Biographia Literaria</i>. For the rest, however, +unless indeed one excepts the four chapters on the Hartleian system and +its relation to the German school of philosophy, the book is rather one +to be dipped into for the peculiar pleasure which an hour in +Coleridge's company must always give to any active intelligence, than +to be systematically studied with a view to perfecting one's conception +of Coleridge's philosophical and critical genius considered in its +totality.</p> + +<p>As to the two lay sermons, the less ambitious of them is decidedly the +more successful. The advice to "the higher and middle classes" on the +existing distresses and discontents contains at least an ingredient of +the practical; its distinctively religious appeals are varied by sound +political and economical arguments; and the enumeration and exposure of +the various artifices by which most orators are accustomed to delude +their hearers is as masterly as only Coleridge could have made it. Who +but he, for instance, could have thrown a piece of subtle observation +into a form in which reason and fancy unite so happily to impress it +on the mind as in the following passage: "The mere appeal to the +auditors, whether the arguments are not such that none but an idiot or +an hireling could resist, is an effective substitute for any argument +at all. For mobs have no memories. They are in nearly the same state +as that of an individual when he makes what is termed a bull. <i>The +passions, like a fused metal, fill up the wide interstices of thought +and supply the defective links; and thus incompatible assertions are +harmonised by the sensation, without the sense of connection</i>." The +other lay sermon, however, the <i>Statesman's Manual</i>, is less +appropriately conceived. Its originating proposition, that the Bible is +"the best guide to political skill and foresight," is undoubtedly open +to dispute, but might nevertheless be capable of plausible defence upon +<i>à priori</i> grounds. Coleridge, however, is not content with this +method of procedure; as, indeed, with so avowedly practical an object +in view he scarcely could be, for a "manual" is essentially a work +intended for the constant consultation of the artificer in the actual +performance of his work, and ought at least to contain illustrations of +the application of its general principles to particular cases. It is in +undertaking to supply these that the essential mysticism of Coleridge's +counsels comes to light. For instance: "I am deceived if you will not be +compelled to admit that the prophet Isaiah revealed the true philosophy +of the French Revolution more than two thousand years before it became a +sad irrevocable truth of history. 'And thou saidst, I shall be a lady +for ever, so that thou didst not lay these things to thy heart neither +didst remember the latter end of it.... Therefore shall evil come upon +thee; thou shalt not know from whence it riseth, etc.'" And to this +ast-quoted sentence Coleridge actually appends the following note: "The +reader will scarcely fail to find in this verse a remembrancer of the +sudden setting in of the frost before the usual time (in a country, +too, where the commencement of its two seasons is in general scarcely +less regular than that of the wet and dry seasons between the tropics) +which caused, and the desolation which accompanied, the flight from +Moscow." One can make no other comment upon this than that if it really + be wisdom which statesmen would do well to lay to heart, the late Dr. +Cumming must have been the most profound instructor in statesmanship +that the world has ever seen. A prime minister of real life, however, +could scarcely be seriously recommended to shape his policy upon a due +consideration of the possible allegoric meaning of a passage in Isaiah, +to say nothing of the obvious objection that this kind of appeal to +<i>Sortes Biblicæ</i> is dangerously liable to be turned against those who +recommend it. On the whole, one must say of this lay sermon that it +justifies the apprehension expressed by the author in its concluding +pages. It does rather "resemble the overflow of an earnest mind than an +orderly and premeditated," in the sense, at any rate, of a well-considered "composition."</p> + +<p>In the month of January 1818 Coleridge once more commenced the delivery +of a course of lectures in London. The scope of this series-fourteen in +number was, as will be seen from the subjoined syllabus, an immensely +comprehensive one. The subject of the first was "the manners, morals, +literature, philosophy, religion, and state of society in general in +European Christendom, from the eighth to the fifteenth century;" and of +the second "the tales and metrical romances common for the most part to +England, Germany, and the north of France; and English songs and ballads +continued to the reign of Charles I." In the third the lecturer proposed +to deal with the poetry of Chaucer and Spenser, of Petrarch, and of +Ariosto, Pulci, and Boiardo. The fourth, fifth, and sixth were to be +devoted to the dramatic works of Shakespeare, and to comprise the +substance of Coleridge's former courses on the same subject, "enlarged +and varied by subsequent study and reflection." In the seventh he was +to treat of the other principal dramatists of the Elizabethan period, +Ben Jonson, Massinger, and Beaumont and Fletcher; in the eighth of the +life and all the works of Cervantes; in the ninth of Rabelais, Swift, +and Sterne, with a dissertation "on the nature and constituents of +genuine humour, and on the distinctions of humorous from the witty, the +fanciful, the droll, the odd, etc." Donne, Dante, and Milton formed the +subject of the tenth; the <i>Arabian Nights Entertainment</i>, and the +<i>romantic</i> use of the supernatural in poetry, that of the eleventh. +The twelfth was to be on "tales of witches and apparitions, etc.," as +distinguished from magic and magicians of Asiatic origin; and the +thirteenth, – "on colour, sound, and form in nature, as connected with +Poesy – the word 'Poesy' being used as the generic or class term +including poetry, music, painting, statuary, and ideal architecture as +its species, the reciprocal relations of poetry and philosophy to each +other, and of both to religion and the moral sense.'" In the fourteenth +and final lecture Coleridge proposed to discuss "the corruptions of the +English language since the reign of Queen Anne, in our style of writing +prose," and to formulate "a few easy rules for the attainment of a +manly, unaffected, and pure language in our genuine mother tongue, +whether for the purposes of writing, oratory, or conversation."</p> + +<p>These lectures, says Mr. Gillman, were from Coleridge's own account +more profitable than any he had before given, though delivered in an +unfavourable situation; a lecture-room in Flower de Luce Court, which, +however, being near the Temple, secured to him the benefit – if benefit +it were – of a considerable number of law students among his auditors. +It was the first time that his devoted guardian had ever heard him in +public, and he reports the significant fact that though Coleridge +lectured from notes, which he had carefully made, "it was obvious that +his audience were more delighted when, putting his notes aside, he +spoke extempore...." He was brilliant, fluent, and rapid; his words +seemed to flow as from a person repeating with grace and energy some +delightful poem. If he sometimes paused, it was not for the want of +words, but that he was seeking their most appropriate or most logical +arrangement.</p> + +<p>An incident related with extreme, though in a great measure +unconscious, drollery by Mr. Gillman in connection with a +lecture delivered at this period is to my mind of more assistance +than many of the accounts of his "lay sermons" in private circles, in +enabling us to comprehend one element of Coleridge's marvellous powers +of discourse. Early one morning at Mr. Gillman's he received two +letters-one to inform him that he was expected that same evening to +deliver a lecture, at the rooms of the London Philosophical Society, +to an audience of some four or five hundred persons; the other +containing a list of the previous lecturers and the lectures delivered +by them during the course of the season. At seven o'clock in the +evening Coleridge and Mr. Gillman went up to town to make some +inquiries respecting this unexpected application; but, on arriving at +the house of the gentleman who had written the letter, they were +informed that he was not at home, but would return at eight o'clock – +the hour fixed for the commencement of the lecture. They then +proceeded to the Society's rooms, where in due time the audience +assembled; and the committee having at last entered and taken their +places on the seats reserved for them, "Mr. President arose from +the centre of the group, and, putting on a 'president's hat,' which +so disfigured him that we could scarcely refrain from laughter, +addressed the company in these words: This evening Mr. Coleridge +will deliver a lecture on 'the Growth of the Individual Mind.'" +Coleridge at first "seemed startled," as well he might, and turning +round to Mr. Gillman whispered: "A pretty stiff subject they have +chosen for me." However, he instantly mounted his standing-place and +began without hesitation, previously requesting his friend to observe +the effect of his lecture on the audience. It was agreed that, should +he appear to fail, Gillman was to "clasp his ancle; but that he was to +continue for an hour if the countenances of his auditors indicated +satisfaction." Coleridge then began his address in these words: "The +lecture I am about to give this evening is purely extempore. Should +you find a nominative case looking out for a verb, or a fatherless +verb for a nominative case, you must excuse it. It is purely extempore, +though I have read and thought much on the subject." At this the +company smiled, which seemed to inspire the lecturer with confidence. +He plunged at once into his lecture – and most brilliant, eloquent, and +logically consecutive it was. The time moved on so swiftly that Mr. +Gillman found, on looking at his watch, that an hour and a half had +passed away, and, therefore, he continues "waiting only a desirable +moment – to use his own playful words – I prepared myself to punctuate +his oration. As previously agreed, I pressed his ancle, and thus gave +him the hint he had requested; when, bowing graciously, and with a +benevolent and smiling countenance, he presently descended. The lecture +was quite new to me, and I believe quite new to himself so far as the +arrangement of his words was concerned. The floating thoughts were +beautifully arranged, and delivered on the spur of the moment. What +accident gave rise to the singular request, that he should deliver +this lecture impromptu, I never learnt; nor did it signify, as it +afforded a happy opportunity to many of witnessing in part the extent +of his reading and the extraordinary strength of his powers."</p> + +<p>It is tantalising to think that no record of this remarkable performance +remains; but, indeed, the same may to some extent be said, and in +various degrees, of nearly all the lectures which Coleridge ever +delivered. With the exception of seven out of the fifteen of 1811, +which were published in 1856 by Mr. Payne Collier from shorthand notes +taken at the time, Coleridge's lectures scarcely exist for us otherwise +than in the form of rough preparatory notes. A few longer pieces, such +as the admirable observations in the second volume of the <i>Literary +Remains</i>, on poetry, on the Greek drama, and on the progress of the +dramatic art in England, are, with the exception above noticed, almost +the only general disquisitions on these subjects which appear to have +reached us in a complete state. Of the remaining contents of the +volume, including the detailed criticisms now textual, now analytic – of +the various plays of Shakespeare, a considerable portion is frankly +fragmentary, pretending, indeed, to no other character than that of +mere marginalia. This, however, does not destroy – I had almost said it +does not even impair – their value. It does but render them all the more +typical productions of a writer, whose greatest services to mankind in +almost every department of human thought and knowledge with which he +concerned himself were much the most often performed in the least +methodical way. In reading through these incomparable notes on +Shakespeare we soon cease to lament, or even to remember, their +unconnected form and often somewhat desultory appearance; if, indeed, +we do not see reason to congratulate ourselves that the annotator, +unfettered by the restraints which the composition of a systematic +treatise would have imposed upon him, is free to range with us at will +over many a flower-strewn field, for which otherwise he could not +perhaps have afforded to quit the main road of his subject. And this +liberty is the more welcome, because Coleridge, <i>primus inter +pares</i> as a critic of any order of literature, is in the domain of +Shakespearian commentary absolute king. The principles of analysis +which he was charged with having borrowed without acknowledgment from +Schlegel, with whose Shakespearian theories he was at the time entirely +unacquainted, were in fact of his own excogitation. He owed nothing in +this matter to any individual German, nor had he anything in common +with German Shakespearianism except its profoundly philosophising +spirit, which, moreover, was in his case directed and restrained by +other qualities, too often wanting in critics of that industrious race; +for he possessed a sense of the ridiculous, a feeling for the poetic, a +tact, a taste, and a judgment, which would have saved many a worthy but +heavy-handed Teutonic professor, who should have been lucky enough to +own these gifts, from exposing himself and his science to the satire of +the light-minded. Very rarely, indeed, do we find Coleridge indulging +<i>plus 'quo</i> his passion for psychological analysis. Deeply as his +criticism penetrates, it is yet loyally recognitive of the opacity of +milestones. Far as he sees into his subject, we never find him fancying +that he sees beyond the point at which the faculty of human vision is +exhausted. His conception of the more complex of Shakespeare's +personages, his theory of their characters, his reading of their +motives, is often subtle, but always sane; his interpretation of the +master's own dealings with them, and of the language which he puts into +their mouths, is often highly imaginative, but it is rarely fanciful. +Take, as an illustration of the first-mentioned merit, the following +acute but eminently sensible estimate of the character of Polonius: – </p> + +<p>"He is the personified memory of wisdom no longer actually possessed. +This admirable character is always misrepresented on the stage. +Shakspeare never intended to exhibit him as a buffoon; for although it +was natural for Hamlet – a young man of fire and genius, detesting +formality and disliking Polonius on political grounds, as imagining +that he had assisted his uncle in his usurpation – should express +himself satirically, yet this must not be taken exactly as the poet's +conception of him. In Polonius a certain induration of character had +arisen from long habits of business; but take his advice to Laertes, +and Ophelia's reverence for his memory, and we shall see that he was +meant to be represented as a statesman somewhat past his faculties – his +recollections of life all full of wisdom, and showing a knowledge of +human nature, while what immediately takes place before him and escapes +from him is indicative of weakness."</p> + +<p>Or this comment on the somewhat faint individualisation of the figure of +Lear:</p> + +<p>"In Lear old age is itself a character-natural imperfections being +increased by life-long habits of receiving a prompt obedience. Any +addition of individualisation would have been unnecessary and painful; +for the relation of others to him, of wondrous fidelity and of frightful +ingratitude, alone sufficiently distinguish him. Thus Lear becomes the +open and ample playroom of nature's passions."</p> + +<p>Or lastly, in illustration of my second point, let us take this note on +the remark of the knight that "since my young lady's going into France the +fool hath much pined away ": – </p> + +<p>"The fool is no comic buffoon – to make the groundlings laugh – no forced +condescension of Shakspeare's genius to the taste of his audience. +Accordingly the poet prepares us for the introduction, which he never does +with any of his common clowns and fools, by bringing him into living +connection with the pathos of the play. He is as wonderful a creation as +Caliban, – his wild babblings and inspired idiocy articulate and gauge the +horrors of the scene."</p> + +<p>The subject is a tempting one to linger over, did not imperative +Exigencies of space compel me to pass on from it. There is much – very +much – more critical matter in the Literary Remains of which it is hard to +forbear quotation; and I may mention in particular the profoundly +suggestive remarks on the nature of the humorous, with their accompanying +analysis of the genius and artistic method of Sterne. But it is, as has +been said, in Shakespearian criticism that Coleridge's unique mastery of +all the tools of the critic is most conspicuous, and it is in the +brilliant, if unmethodised, pages which I have been discussing that we +may most readily find consolation for the too early silencing of his +muse. For these consummate criticisms are essentially and above all the +criticisms of a poet They are such as could not have been achieved by +any man not originally endowed with that divine gift which was fated in +this instance to expend itself within so few years. Nothing, indeed, +could more strikingly illustrate the commanding advantage possessed by +a poet interpreting a poet than is to be found in Coleridge's +occasional sarcastic comments on the <i>banalitès</i> of our national +poet's most prosaic commentator, Warburton – the "thought-swarming, but +idealess Warburton," as he once felicitously styles him. The one man +seems to read his author's text under the clear, diffused, unwavering +radiance emitted from his own poetic imagination; while the criticism +of the other resembles a perpetual scratching of damp matches, which +ash a momentary light into one corner of the dark assage, and then go +out.</p> + + + +<a name="chap10"></a> +<h2>Chapter X</h2> + +<blockquote>Closing years – Temporary renewal of money troubles – The Aids to Reflection + – Growing weakness-Visit to Germany with the Wordsworths – Last illness +and death.</blockquote> + +<p style='text-align: center'>[1818-1834.]</p> + +<p>For the years which now remained to Coleridge, some sixteen in number, +dating from his last appearance as a public lecturer, his life would +seem to have been attended with something, at least, of that sort of +happiness which is enjoyed by the nation of uneventful annals. There is +little to be told of him in the way of literary performance; little +record remains, unfortunately, of the discursively didactic talk in +which, during these years, his intellectual activity found its busiest +exercise; of incident in the ordinary sense of the word there is almost +none. An account of these closing days of his life must resolve itself +almost wholly into a "history of opinion," – an attempt to reanimate for +ourselves that life of perpetual meditation which Coleridge lived, and +to trace, so far as the scanty evidence of his utterances enables us to +do so, the general tenor of his daily thoughts. From one point of view, +of course, this task would be extremely difficult, if not impossible; +from another comparatively easy. It is easy, that is to say, to +investigate Coleridge's speculations, so far as their subject is +concerned, whatever difficulties their obscurity and subtlety may +present to the inquirer; for, as a matter of fact, their subject is +remarkably uniform. Attempts to divide the literary life of a writer +into eras are more often arbitrary and fanciful than not; but the +peculiar circumstances of Coleridge's career did in fact effect the +division for themselves. His life until the age of twenty-six may +fairly be described as in its "poetic period." It was during these +years, and indeed during the last two or three of them, that he +produced all the poetry by which he will be remembered, while he +produced little else of mark or memorability. The twenty years which +follow from 1798 to 1818 may with equal accuracy be styled the +"critical period." It was during these years that he did his best work +as a journalist, and all his work as a public lecturer on aesthetics. +It was during them that he said his say, and even his final say, so far +as any public modes of expression were concerned, on politics and on +art. From 1818 to his death his life was devoted entirely to +metaphysics and theology, and with such close and constant reference to +the latter subject, to which indeed his metaphysics had throughout his +life been ancillary, that it deserves to give the name of the +"theological period" to these closing years.</p> + +<p>Their lack of incident, however, is not entirely as favourable a +circumstance as that uneventfulness of national annals to which I have +compared it; for, though "no news may be good news" in the case of a +nation's history, it is by no means as certainly so in the case of a +man's biography, and, least of all, when the subject is a man whose +inward life of thought and feeling so completely overshadowed his outward +life of action throughout his whole career. There is indeed evidence, +slight in amount, but conclusive in character-plain and painful evidence +enough to show that at least the first four or five years of the period we +have mentioned were not altogether years of resignation and calm; that +they were embittered by recurring agonies of self-reproach, by</p> + +<p> "Sense of past youth, and manhood come in vain, + And genius given, and knowledge won in vain;"</p> + +<p>and by the desolating thought that all which had been "culled in wood-walks wild," and "all which patient toil had reared," were to be</p> + +<p> – "but flowers + Strewn on the corse, and borne upon the bier, + In the same coffin, for the self-same grave!"</p> + +<p>Here and there in the correspondence with Thomas Allsop we obtain a +glimpse into that vast half-darkened arena in which this captive spirit +self-condemned to the lions was struggling its last. To one strange and +hitherto unexplained letter I have already referred. It was written +from Ramsgate in the autumn of 1822, evidently under circumstances of +deep depression. But there is a letter nearly two years earlier in date +addressed to the same correspondent which contains by far the fullest +account of Coleridge's then condition of mind, the state of his +literary engagements and his literary projects, his completed and +uncompleted work. As usual with him it is stress of money matters that +prompts him to write, and he prefaces his request for assistance with +the following portentous catalogue of realised or contemplated schemes. +"Contemplated," indeed, is too modest a word, according to his own +account, to be applied to any one item in the formidable list. Of all +of them, he has, he tells Allsop, "already the written materials and +contents, requiring only to be put together from the loose papers and +commonplace in memorandum books, and needing no other change, whether +of omission, addition, or correction, than the mere act of arranging, +and the opportunity of seeing the whole collectively, bring with them +of course." Heads I. and II. of the list comprise those criticisms on +Shakespeare and the other principal Elizabethan dramatists; on Dante, +Spenser, Milton, Cervantes, Calderon; on Chaucer, Ariosto, Donne, +Rabelais, etc., which formed the staple of the course of lectures +delivered in 1818, and which were published after his death in the +first two of the four volumes of <i>Literary Remains</i> brought out +under the editorship of Mr. H. N. Coleridge. Reserving No. III. for a +moment we find No. IV. to consist of "Letters on the Old and New +Testament, and on the Doctrines and Principles held in common by the +Fathers and Founders of the Reformation, addressed to a Candidate for +Holy Orders, including advice on the plan and subjects of preaching +proper to a minister of the Established Church." The letters never +apparently saw the light of publicity, at any rate, in the epistolary +form, either during the author's lifetime or after his death; and with +regard to II. and III., which did obtain posthumous publication, the +following caution should be borne in mind by the reader. "To the +completion," says Coleridge, "of these four works I have literally +nothing more to do than to transcribe; but, as I before hinted, from so +many scraps and Sibylline leaves, including margins of blank pages that +unfortunately I must be my own scribe, and, not done by myself, they +will be all but lost." As matters turned out he was not his own scribe, +and the difficulty which Mr. Nelson Coleridge experienced in piecing +together the fragmentary materials at his disposal is feelingly +described by him in his preface to the first edition. He added that the +contents of these volumes were drawn from a portion only of the MSS. +entrusted to him, and that the remainder of the collection, which, +under favourable circumstances, he hoped might hereafter see the +light, "was at least of equal value" with what he was then presenting to +the reader. This hope was never realised; and it must be remembered, +therefore, that the published record of Coleridge's achievements as a +critic is, as has already been pointed out, extremely imperfect. [<a href="#foot_10-1">1</a>] +That it is not even more disappointingly so than it is, may well +entitle his nephew and editor to the gratitude of posterity; but where +much has been done, there yet remains much to do ere Coleridge's +consummate analyses of poetic and dramatic works can be presented to +the reader in other than their present shape of a series of detached +brilliancies. The pearls are there, but the string is wanting. Whether +it will be ever supplied, or whether it is possible now to supply it, +one cannot say.</p> + +<p>The third of Coleridge's virtually completed works there is much virtue +in a "virtually"-was a "History of Philosophy considered as a Tendency +of the Human Mind to exhibit the Powers of the Human Reason, to +discover by its own strength the Origin and Laws of Man and the World, +from Pythagoras to Locke and Condillac." This production, however, +considerable as it is, was probably merely ancillary to what he calls +"My GREAT WORK, to the preparation of which more than twenty years of +my life have been devoted, and on which my hopes of extensive and +permanent utility, of fame in the noblest sense of the word, mainly +rest." To this work he goes on to say:</p> + +<p>"All my other writings, unless I except my Poems (and these I can +exclude in part only), are introductory and preparative, while its +result, if the premises be as I with the most tranquil assurance am +convinced they are-incontrovertible, the deductions legitimate, and the +conclusions commensurate, and only commensurate with both [must be], to +effect a revolution in all that has been called Philosophy and +Metaphysics in England and France since the era of commencing +predominance of the mechanical system at the Restoration of our Second +Charles, and with [in] the present fashionable views not only of +religion, morals, and politics, but even of the modern physics and +physiology."</p> + +<p>This, it must be allowed, is a sufficiently "large order," being +Apparently indeed nothing less than an undertaking to demolish the +system of Locke and his successors, and to erect German +Transcendentalism on the ruins. With anything less than this, however +with any less noble object or less faith in their attainments – +Coleridge could not, he declares, have stood acquitted of folly and +abuse of time, talent, and learning, on a labour of three – fourths of +his intellectual life. Somewhat more than a volume of this <i>magnum +opus</i> had been dictated by him to his "friend and enlightened pupil, +Mr. Green, so as to exist fit for the press;" and more than as much +again had been done, but he had been compelled to break off the weekly +meetings with his pupil from the necessity of writing on subjects of +the passing day. Then comes a reference, the last we meet with, to the +real "great work," as the unphilosophic world has always considered and +will always consider it. On this subject he says:</p> + +<p>"Of my poetic works I would fain finish the <i>Christabel</i>, Alas! +for the proud time when I planned, when I had present to my mind the +materials as well as the scheme of the Hymns entitled Spirit, Sun, +Earth, Air, Water, Fire, and Man; and the Epic Poem on what appears to +me the only fit subject remaining for an Epic Poem – Jerusalem besieged +and destroyed by Titus."</p> + +<p>And then there follows this most pathetic passage, necessary, in spite +of its length, to be transcribed entire, both on account of the value +of its biographic details – its information on the subject of the useless +worldly affairs, etc. – and because of the singularly penetrating light +which it throws upon the mental and moral nature of the man: – </p> + +<p>"I have only by fits and starts ever prayed – I have not prevailed upon +myself to pray to God in sincerity and entireness for the fortitude +that might enable me to resign myself to the abandonment of all my +life's best hopes, to say boldly to myself, 'Gifted with powers +confessedly above mediocrity, aided by an education of which no less +from almost unexampled hardships and sufferings than from manifold and +peculiar advantages I have never yet found a parallel, I have devoted +myself to a life of unintermitted reading, thinking, meditating, and +observing, I have not only sacrificed all worldly prospects of wealth +and advancement, but have in my inmost soul stood aloof from temporary +reputation. In consequence of these toils and this self-dedication I +possess a calm and clear consciousness that in many and most important +departments of truth and beauty I have outstrode my contemporaries, +those at least of highest name, that the number of my. printed works +bear witness that I have not been idle, and the seldom acknowledged but +strictly <i>proveable</i> effects of my labours appropriated to the +welfare of my age in the <i>Morning Post</i> before the peace of +Amiens, in the <i>Courier</i> afterwards, and in the serious and +various subjects of my lectures... (add to which the unlimited freedom +of my communications to colloquial life) may surely be allowed as +evidence that I have not been useless to my generation. But, from +circumstances, the main portion of my harvest is still on the ground, +ripe indeed and only waiting, a few for the sickle, but a large part +only for the <i>sheaving</i> and carting and housing-but from all this +I must turn away and let them rot as they lie, and be as though they +never had been; for I must go and gather black berries and earth-nuts, +or pick mushrooms and gild oak-apples for the palate and fancies of +chance customers. I must abrogate the name of philosopher and poet, and +scribble as fast as I can and with as little thought as I can for +<i>Blackwood's Magazine</i>, or as I have been employed for the last +days in writing MS. sermons for lazy clergymen who stipulate that the +composition must be more than respectable.'... This" [<i>i.e.</i> to +say this to myself] "I have not yet had courage to do. My soul sickens +and my heart sinks, and thus oscillating between both" [forms of +activity – the production of permanent and of ephemeral work] "I do +neither – neither as it ought to be done to any profitable end."</p> + +<p>And his proposal for extricating himself from this distressing position +is that "those who think respectfully and hope highly of my power and +attainments should guarantee me a yearly sum for three or four years, +adequate to my actual support, with such comforts and decencies of +appearance as my health and habit have made necessaries, so that my +mind may be unanxious as far as the present time is concerned." Thus +provided for he would undertake to devote two-thirds of his time to +some one work of those above mentioned that is to say, of the first +four – and confine it exclusively to it till finished, while the +remaining third of his time he would go on maturing and completing his +"great work," and "(for, if but easy in my mind, I have no doubt either +of the reawakening power or of the kindling inclination) my +<i>Christabel</i> and what else the happier hour may inspire." Mr. +Green, he goes on to say, had promised to contribute £30 to £40 yearly, +another pupil, "the son of one of my dearest old friends, £50," and £10 +or £20 could, he thought, be relied on from another. The whole amount +of the required annuity would be about £200, to be repaid of course +should disposal or sale of his works produce, or as far as they should +produce, the means. But "am I entitled," he asks uneasily, "have I a +<i>right</i> to do this I Can I do it without moral degradation? And +lastly, can it be done without loss of character in the eyes of my +acquaintances and of my friends' acquaintances?"</p> + +<p>I cannot take upon myself to answer these painful questions. The reply +to be given to them must depend upon the judgment which each individual +student of this remarkable but unhappy career may pass upon it as a +whole; and, while it would be too much to expect that that judgment +should be entirely favourable, one may at least believe that a fair +allowance for those inveterate weaknesses of physical constitution +which so largely aggravated, if they did not wholly generate, the fatal +infirmities of Coleridge's moral nature, must materially mitigate the +harshness of its terms.</p> + +<p>The story of Coleridge's closing years is soon told. It is mainly a +record of days spent in meditation and discourse, in which character it +will be treated of more fully in a subsequent chapter. His literary +productions during the last fourteen years of his life were few in +number, and but one of them of any great importance. In 1821 he had +offered himself as an occasional contributor to <i>Blackwood's +Magazine</i>, but a series of papers promised by him to that periodical +were uncompleted, and his only two contributions (in October 1821 and +January 1822) are of no particular note. In May 1825 he read a paper on +the <i>Prometheus</i> of 'schylus before the Royal Society of Literature; +but "the series of disquisitions respecting the Egyptian in connection +with the sacerdotal theology and in contrast with the mysteries of +ancient Greece," to which this essay had been announced as preparatory, +never made their appearance. In the same year, however, he published +one of the best known of his prose works, his <i>Aids to Reflection</i>.</p> + +<p>Of the success of this latest of Coleridge's more important +contributions to literature there can be no doubt. New editions of it +seem to have been demanded at regular intervals for some twenty years +after its first production, and it appears to have had during the same +period a relatively equal reissue in the United States. The Rev. Dr. +James Marsh, an American divine of some ability and reputation, +composed a preliminary essay (now prefixed to the fifth English +edition), in which he elaborately set forth the peculiar merits of the +work, and undertook to initiate the reader in the fittest and most +profitable method of making use of it. In these remarks the reverend +essayist insists more strongly on the spiritually edifying quality of +the <i>Aids</i> than on their literary merits, and, for my own part, I +must certainly consider him right in doing so. As a religious manual it +is easy to understand how this volume of Coleridge's should have +obtained many and earnest readers. What religious manual, which shows +traces of spiritual insight, or even merely of pious yearnings after +higher and holier than earthly things, has ever failed to win such +readers among the weary and heavy-laden of the world? And that +Coleridge, a writer of the most penetrating glance into divine +mysteries, and writing always from a soul all tremulous, as it were, +with religious sensibility, should have obtained such readers in +abundance is not surprising. But to a critic and literary biographer I +cannot think that his success in this respect has much to say. For my +own part, at any rate, I find considerable difficulty in tracing it to +any distinctively literary origin. There seems to me to be less charm +of thought, less beauty of style, less even of Coleridge's seldom-failing force of effective statement, in the <i>Aids to Reflection</i> +than in almost any of his writings. Even the volume of some dozen short +chapters on the Constitution of the Church and State, published in +1830, as an "aid towards a right judgment in the late Catholic Kelief +Bill," appears to me to yield a more characteristic flavour of the +author's style, and to exhibit far more of his distinction of literary +workmanship than the earlier and more celebrated work.</p> + +<p>Among the acquaintances made by Coleridge after his retirement to Mr. +Gillman's was one destined to be of some importance to the history of +his philosophical work. It was that of a gentleman whose name has +already been mentioned in this chapter, Mr. Joseph Henry Green, +afterwards a distinguished surgeon and Fellow of the Royal Society, who +in his early years had developed a strong taste for metaphysical +speculation, going even so far as to devote one of his hard-earned +periods of professional holiday to a visit to Germany for the sake of +studying philosophy in that home of abstract thought. To him Coleridge +was introduced by his old Roman acquaintance, Ludwig Tieck, on one of +the latter's visits to England, and he became, as the extract above +quoted from Coleridge's correspondence shows, his enthusiastic disciple +and indefatigable fellow-worker. In the pursuit of their common studies +and in those weekly reunions of admiring friends which Coleridge, while +his health permitted it, was in the habit of holding, we may believe +that a considerable portion of these closing years of his life was +passed under happier conditions than he had been long accustomed to. It +is pleasant to read of him among his birds and flowers, and surrounded +by the ever-watchful tendance of the affectionate Gillmans, tranquil in +mind at any rate, if not at ease from his bodily ailments, and +enjoying, as far as enjoyment was possible to him, the peaceful close +of a stormy and unsettled day. For the years 1825-30, moreover, his +pecuniary circumstances were improved to the extent of £105 per annum, +obtained for him at the instance of the Royal Society of Literature, +and held by him till the death of George IV.</p> + +<p>Two incidents of his later years are, however, worthy of more special +mention – a tour up the Rhine, which he took in 1828, in company with +Wordsworth and his daughter; and, some years earlier, a meeting with +John Keats. "A loose, slack, not well dressed youth," it is recorded in +the <i>Table Talk,</i> published after his death by his nephew, "met +Mr.—" (it was Mr. Green, of whom more hereafter) "and myself in a +lane near Highgate. Green knew him and spoke. It was Keats. He was +introduced to me, and stayed a minute or so. After he had left us a +little way, he came back and said, 'Let me carry away the memory, +Coleridge, of having pressed your hand.' 'There is death in that hand,' +I said to Green when Keats was gone; yet this was, I believe, before +the consumption showed itself distinctly."</p> + +<p>His own health, however, had been steadily declining in these latter +years, and the German tour with the Wordsworths must, I should imagine, +have been the last expedition involving any considerable exercise of +the physical powers which he was able to take. Within a year or so +afterwards his condition seems to have grown sensibly worse. In +November 1831 he writes that for eighteen months past his life had been +"one chain of severe sicknesses, brief and imperfect convalescences, +and capricious relapses." Henceforth he was almost entirely confined to +the sick-room. His faculties, however, still remained clear and +unclouded. The entries in the <i>Table Talk</i> do not materially +dimmish in frequency. Their tone of colloquy undergoes no perceptible +variation; they continue to be as stimulating and delightful reading as +ever. Not till 11th July 1834 do we find any change; but here at last +we meet the shadow, deemed longer than it was in reality, of the +approaching end. "I am dying," said Coleridge, "but without expectation +of a speedy release. Is it not strange that, very recently, bygone +images and scenes of early life have stolen into my mind like breezes +blown from the spice-islands of Youth and Hope – those twin realities of +the phantom world! I do not add Love, for what is Love but Youth and +Hope embracing, and, so seen, as <i>one</i>.... Hooker wished to live +to finish his <i>Ecclesiastical Polity</i> – so I own I wish life and +strength had been spared to me to complete my <i>Philosophy.</i> For, +as God hears me, the originating, continuing, and sustaining wish and +design in my heart were to exalt the glory of His name; and, which is +the same thing in other words, to promote the improvement of mankind. +But <i>visum aliter Deo,</i> and His will be done."</p> + +<p>The end was nearer than he thought. It was on the 11th of July, as has +been said, that he uttered these last words of gentle and pious +resignation. On that day fortnight he died. Midway, however, in this +intervening period, he knew that the "speedy release" which he had not +ventured to expect was close at hand. The death, when it came, was in +some sort emblematic of the life. Sufferings severe and constant, till +within thirty-six hours of the end: at the last peace. On the 25th of +July 1834 this sorely-tried, long-labouring, fate-marred and self-marred life passed tranquilly away. The pitiful words of Kent over his +dead master rise irrepressibly to the lips – </p> + +<p> "O let him pass: he hates him + Who would upon the rack of this tough world + Stretch him out longer."</p> + +<p>There might have been something to be said, though not by Kent, of the +weaknesses of Lear himself; but at such a moment compassion both for +the king and for the poet may well impose silence upon censure.</p> + +<blockquote style="font-variant: small-caps"><strong>Footnotes</strong></blockquote> + +<p><a name="foot_10-1"></a>1. How imperfect, a comparison between estimated and actual bulk will +show. No. I. was, according to Coleridge's reckoning, to form three +volumes of 500 pages each. In the Literary Remains it fills less than +half of four volumes of little more than 400 pages each.</p> + + + +<a name="chap11"></a> +<h2>Chapter XI</h2> + +<blockquote>Coleridge's metaphysics and theology – The <i>Spiritual Philosophy</i> +of Mr. Green.</blockquote> + +<p>In spite of all the struggles, the resolutions, and the entreaties +which displayed themselves so distressingly in the letter to Mr. +Allsop, quoted in the last chapter, it is doubtful whether Coleridge's +"great work" made much additional progress during the last dozen years +of his life. The weekly meeting with Mr. Green seems, according to the +latter's biographer, to have been resumed. Mr. Simon tells us that he +continued year after year to sit at the feet of his Gamaliel, getting +more and more insight into his opinions, until, in 1834, two events +occurred which determined the remaining course of Mr. Green's life. One +of these events, it is needless to say, was Coleridge's death; the +other was the death of his disciple's father, with the result of +leaving Mr. Green possessed of such ample means as to render him +independent of his profession. The language of Coleridge's will, +together, no doubt, with verbal communications which had passed, +imposed on Mr. Green what he accepted as an obligation to devote so far +as necessary the whole remaining strength and earnestness of his life +to the one task of systematising, developing, and establishing the +doctrines of the Coleridgian philosophy. Accordingly, in 1836, two +years after his master's death, he retired from medical practice, and +thenceforward, until his own death nearly thirty years afterwards, he +applied himself unceasingly to what was in a twofold sense a labour of +love.</p> + +<p>We are not, it seems from his biographer's account, to suppose that Mr. +Green's task was in any material degree lightened for him by his previous +collaboration with Coleridge. The latter had, as we have seen, declared +in his letter to Allsop that "more than a volume" of the great work had +been dictated by him to Mr. Green, so as to exist in a condition fit for +the press: but this, according to Mr. Simon, was not the case; and the +probability is therefore that "more than a volume" meant written material +equal in amount to more than a volume – of course, an entirely different +thing. Mr. Simon, at any rate, assures us that no available written +material existed for setting comprehensively before the public, in +Coleridge's own language, and in an argued form, the philosophical system +with which he wished his name to be identified. Instead of it there were +fragments – for the most part mutually inadaptable fragments, and +beginnings, and studies of special subjects, and numberless notes on the +margins and fly-leaves of books.</p> + +<p>With this equipment, such as it was, Mr. Green set to work to methodise +the Coleridgian doctrines, and to construct from them nothing less than +such a system of philosophy as should "virtually include the law and +explanation of all being, conscious and unconscious, and of all +correlativity and duty, and be applicable directly or by deduction to +whatsoever the human mind can contemplate – sensuous or supersensuous – of +experience, purpose, or imagination." Born under post-diluvian +conditions, Mr. Green was of course unable to accomplish his self-proposed enterprise, but he must be allowed to have attacked his task +with remarkable energy. "Theology, ethics, politics and political +history, ethnology, language, aesthetics, psychology, physics, and the +allied sciences, biology, logic, mathematics, pathology, all these +subjects," declares his biographer, "were thoughtfully studied by him, in +at least their basial principles and metaphysics, and most were +elaborately written of, as though for the divisions of some vast +cyclop'dic work." At an early period of his labours he thought it +convenient to increase his knowledge of Greek; he began to study Hebrew +when more than sixty years old, and still later in life he took up +Sanscrit. It was not until he was approaching his seventieth year and +found his health beginning to fail him that Mr. Green seems to have felt +that his design, in its more ambitious scope, must be abandoned, and +that, in the impossibility of applying the Coleridgian system of +philosophy to all human knowledge, it was his imperative duty under his +literary trust to work out that particular application of it which its +author had most at heart. Already, in an unpublished work which he had +made it the first care of his trusteeship to compose, he had, though but +roughly and imperfectly, as he considered, exhibited the relation of his +master's doctrines to revealed religion, and it had now become time to +supersede this unpublished compendium, the <i>Religio Laici</i>, as he +had styled it, by a fuller elaboration of the great Coleridgian position, +that "Christianity, rightly understood, is identical with the highest +philosophy, and that, apart from all question of historical evidence, the +essential doctrines of Christianity are necessary and eternal truths of +reason – truths which man, by the vouchsafed light of Nature and without +aid from documents or tradition, may always and anywhere discover for +himself." To this work accordingly Mr. Green devoted the few remaining +years of his life, and, dying in 1863 at the age of seventy-two, left +behind him in MS. the work entitled <i>Spiritual Philosophy: founded on +the teaching of the late Samuel Taylor Coleridge,</i> which was published +two years later, together with the memoir of the author, from which I +have quoted, by Mr. John Simon. It consists of two volumes, the first of +which is devoted to the exposition of the general principles of +Coleridge's philosophy, while the second is entirely theological, and +aims at indicating on principles for which the first volume has +contended, the essential doctrines of Christianity.</p> + +<p>The earlier chapters of this volume Mr. Green devotes to an exposition +(if indeed the word can be applied to what is really a catalogue of the +results of a transcendental intuition) of the essential difference +between the reason and the understanding – a distinction which Coleridge +has himself elsewhere described as preeminently the <i>gradus ad +philosophiam,</i> and might well have called its <i>pons asinorum.</i> In +the second part of his first volume Mr. Green applies himself to the +establishment of a position which, fundamental as it must be accounted in +all philosophical speculations of this school, is absolutely vital to the +theology which Coleridge sought to erect upon a metaphysical basis. This +position is that the human will is to be regarded as the one ultimate +fact of self-consciousness. So long as man confines himself to the +contemplation of his percipient and reflective self alone – so long as he +attends only to those modes of consciousness which are produced in him by +the impressions of the senses and the operations of thought, he can never +hope to escape from the famous <i>reductio ad inscibile</i> of Hume. He +can never affirm anything more than the existence of those modes of +consciousness, or assert, at least as a direct deliverance of intuition, +that his conscious self <i>is</i> anything apart from the perceptions and +concepts to which he is attending. But when he turns from his perceiving +and thinking to his willing self he becomes for the first time aware of +something deeper than the mere objective presentations of consciousness; +he obtains a direct intuition of an originant, causative, and independent +self-existence. He will have attained in short to the knowledge of a +noumenon, and of the only knowable noumenon. The barrier, elsewhere +insuperable between the subject and object, is broken down; that which +<i>knows</i> becomes identified with that which <i>is;</i> and in the +consciousness of will the consciousness also of a self, as something +independent of and superior to its own modifications, is not so much +affirmed as acquired. The essence, in short, of the Coleridgian ontology +consists in the alteration of a single though a very important word in +the well-known Cartesian formula. <i>Cogito ergo sum</i> had been shown +by Hume to involve an illicit process of reasoning. Descartes, according +to the Scottish sceptic, had no right to have said more than <i>Cogito +ergo cogitationes sunt.</i> But substitute willing for thinking, convert +the formula into <i>Volo ergo sum</i>, and it becomes irrefragable.</p> + +<p>So far as I can perceive, it would have been sufficient for Mr. Green's +subsequent argument to have thus established the position of the will as +the ultimate fact of consciousness, but he goes on to assert that he has +thus secured the immovable ground of a philosophy of Realism. For since +man, "in affirming his Personality by the verb substantive I am, asserts, +nay, acquires, the knowledge of his own Substance as a Spiritual being, +and thereby knows what substance truly and properly is – so he +contemplates the outward, persons or things, as subjects partaking of +reality by virtue of the same substance of which he is conscious in his +own person." So far, however, from this being a philosophy of Realism, it +is in effect, if not indeed in actual terms, a philosophy of Idealism. I, +at least, am unable to see how any Idealist, from Berkeley downwards, +could ask for a better definition of his theory of the external world +than that it "partakes of reality by virtue of the same substance of +which he is conscious in his own person."</p> + +<p>But it is, of course, with the second volume of Mr. Green's work that one +is chiefly concerned. Had Coleridge been a mere Transcendentalist for +Transcendentalism's sake, had there been no connection between his +philosophy of Being and his religious creed, it might be a question +whether even the highly condensed and necessarily imperfect sketch which +has here been given of it would not have been superfluous and out of +place. But Coleridge was a Theosophist first, and a philosopher +afterwards; it was mainly as an organon of religion that he valued his +philosophy, and it was to the development and perfection of it, <i>as +such organon,</i> that he may be said to have devoted, so far as it could +be redeemed from its enthralment to lower necessities, the whole of the +latter half of his career. No account of his life, therefore, could be +complete without at least some brief glance at the details of this +notable attempt to lead the world to true religion by the road of the +Transcendental philosophy. It is difficult, of course, for those who have +been trained in a wholly differet school of thought to do justice to +processes of reasoning carried on, as they cannot but hold, in terms of +the inconceivable; it is still more difficult to be sure that you have +done justice to it after all has been said; and I think that no candid +student of the Coleridgian philosophico-theology (not being a professed +disciple of it, and therefore bound, at any rate, to feign familiarity +with incomprehensibilities) will deny that he is often compelled, to +formulate its positions and recite its processes in somewhat of the same +modest and confiding spirit as animates those youthful geometricians who +leacn their Euclid by heart. With this proviso I will, as briefly as may +be, trace the course of the dialectic by which Mr. Green seeks to make +the Coleridgian metaphysics demonstrative of the truth of Christianity.</p> + +<p>Having shown that the Will is the true and the only tenable base of +Philosophic Realism, the writer next proceeds to explain the growth of +the Soul, from its rudimental strivings in its fallen condition to the +development of its spiritual capabilities and to trace its ascent to the +conception of the Idea of God. The argument – if we may apply so definite +a name to a process which is continually forced to appeal to something +that may perhaps be higher, but is certainly <i>other</i> than the +ratiocinative faculty – is founded partly on moral and partly on +intellectual considerations. By an analysis of the moral phenomena +associated with the action of the human will, and, in particular, of the +conflict which arises between "the tendency of all Will to make itself +absolute," and the consciousness that, under the conditions of man's +fallen state, nothing but misery could result both to the individual and +the race from the fulfilment of this tendency, – Mr. Green shows how the +Soul, or the Reason, or the Speculative Intellect (for he seems to use +all three expressions indiscriminately) is morally prepared for the +reception of the truth which his Understanding alone could never have +compassed, – the Idea of God. This is in effect neither more nor less than +a restatement of that time-honoured argument for the existence of some +Being of perfect holiness which has always weighed so much with men of +high spirituality as to blind them to the fact of its actually enhancing +the intellectual difficulties of the situation. Man possesses a Will +which longs to fulfil itself; but it is coupled with a nature which +constantly impels him to those gratifications of will which tend not to +self-preservation and progress, but to their contraries. Surely, then, on +the strength of the mere law of life, which prevails everywhere, here +must be some higher archetypal Will, to which human wills, or rather +certain selected examples of them, may more and more conform themselves, +and in which the union of unlimited efficiency in operation with +unqualified purity of aim has been once for all effected. Or to put it +yet another way: The life of the virtuous man is a life auxiliary to the +preservation and progress of the race; but his will is under restraint. +The will of the vicious man energises freely enough, but his life is +hostile to the preservation and progress of the race. Now the natural and +essential <i>nisus</i> of all Will is towards absolute freedom. But +nothing in life has a natural and essential <i>nisus</i> towards that +which tends to its deterioration and extinction. Therefore, there must be +some ultimate means of reconciling absolute freedom of the Will with +perfectly salutary conditions of its exercise. And since Mr. Green, like +his master and all other Platonists, is incapable of stopping here, and +contenting himself with assuming the existence of a "stream of tendency" +which will gradually bring the human will into the required conditions, +he here makes the inevitable Platonic jump, and proceeds to conclude that +there must be a self-existent ideal Will in which absolute freedom and +power concur with perfect purity and holiness.</p> + +<p>So much for the moral part of Mr. Green's proof, which so far fails, it +will be observed, to carry us much beyond the Pantheistic position. It +has, that is to say, to be proved that the "power not ourselves," which +has been called Will, originates in some source to which we should be +rationally justified in giving the name of "God;" and, singular as such a +thing may seem, it is impossible at any rate for the logic of the +understanding to regard Mr. Green's argument on this point as otherwise +than hopelessly circular. The half-dozen pages or so which he devotes to +the refutation of the Pantheistic view reduce themselves to the following +simple <i>petitio principii:</i> the power is first assumed to be a Will; +it is next affirmed with perfect truth that the very notion of Will would +escape us except under the condition of Personality; and from this the +existence of a personal God as the source of the power in question +deduced. And the same vice underlies the further argument by which Mr. +Green meets the familiar objection to the personality of the Absolute as +involving contradictory conceptions. An infinite Person, he argues, is no +contradiction in terms, unless "finition or limitation" be regarded as +identical with "negation" (which, when applied to a hypothetical +Infinite, one would surely think it is); and an Absolute Will is not the +less absolute from being self-determined <i>ab intra.</i> For how, he +asks, can any Will which is causative of reality be conceived as a Will +except by conceiving it as <i>se finiens,</i> predetermining itself to +the specific processes required by the act of causation? How, indeed? But +the answer of a Pantheist would of course be that the very impossibility +of conceiving of Will except as <i>se finiens</i> is his very ground for +rejecting the notion of a volitional (in the sense of a personal) origin +of the cosmos.</p> + +<p>However, it is beyond my purposes to enter into any detailed criticism of +Mr. Green's position, more especially as I have not yet reached the +central and capital point of his spiritual philosophy – the construction +of the Christian theology on the basis of the Coleridgian metaphysics. +Having deduced the Idea of God from man's consciousness of an individual +Will perpetually affirming itself, Mr. Green proceeds to evolve the Idea +of the Trinity, by (as he considers it) an equally necessary process from +two of the invariable accompaniments of the above-mentioned introspective +act. "For as in our consciousness," he truly says, "we are under the +necessity of distinguishing the relation of 'myself,' now as the +<i>subject</i> thinking and now as the <i>object</i> contemplated in the +manifold of thought, so we might express the relations in the Divine +instance as <i>Deus Subjectivus</i> and <i>Deus Objectimis,</i> – that is, +the Absolute Subjectivity or Supreme Will, uttering itself as and +contemplating itself in the Absolute Objectivity or plenitude of Being +eternally and causatively realised in his Personality." Whence it follows +(so runs or seems to run the argument) that the Idea of God the Father as +necessarily involves the Idea of God the Son as the "I" who, as the +thinking subject, contemplate myself, implies the contemplated "Me" as +the object thought of. Again, the man who reflects on the fact of his +consciousness, "which discloses to him the unavoidable opposition of +subject and object in the self of which he is conscious, cannot fail to +see that the conscious mind requires not only the distinction in order to +the act of reflection in itself, but the continual sense of the relative +nature of the distinction and of the essential oneness of the mind +itself." Whence it follows (so runs or seems to run the argument) that +the Idea of the first two Persons of the Trinity as necessarily involves +the Idea of the Third Person, as the contemplation of the "Me" by the "I" +implies the perpetual consciousness that the contemplator and the +contemplated – the "I" and the "Me" – are one. In this manner is the Idea +of the Trinity shown to be involved in the Idea of God, and to arise out +of it by an implication as necessary as that which connects together the +three phases of consciousness attendant upon every self-contemplative act +of the individual mind. [<a href="#foot_11-1">1</a>]</p> + +<p>It may readily be imagined that after the Speculative Reason has been +made to perform such feats as these the remainder of the work proposed to +it could present no serious difficulty. And in the half-dozen chapters +which follow it is made to evolve in succession the doctrine of the +Incarnation, the Advent, and the Atonement of Christ, and to explain the +mysteries of the fall of man and of original sin. Considered in the +aspect in which Coleridge himself would have preferred to regard his +pupil's work, namely as a systematic attempt to lead the minds of men to +Christianity by an intellectual route, no more hopeless enterprise +perhaps could have been conceived than that embodied in these volumes. It +is like offering a traveller a guide-book written in hieroglyphics. Upon +the most liberal computation it is probable that not one-fourth part of +educated mankind are capable of so much as comprehending the philosophic +doctrine upon which Coleridge seeks to base Christianity, and it is +doubtful whether any but a still smaller fraction of these would admit +that the foundation was capable of supporting the superstructure. That +the writings of the pupil, like the teachings of the master whom he +interprets, may serve the cause of religion in another than an +intellectual way is possible enough. Not a few of the functions assigned +to the Speculative Reason will strike many of us as moral and spiritual +rather than intellectual in their character, and the appeal to them is in +fact an appeal to man to chasten the lower passions of his nature, and to +discipline his unruly will. Exhortations of that kind are religious all +the world of philosophy over, and will succeed in proportion to the moral +fervour and oratorical power which distinguish them. But if the benefits +of Coleridge's theological teachings are to be reduced to this, it would +of course have been much better to have dissociated them altogether from +the exceedingly abstruse metaphysic to which they have been wedded.</p> + +<blockquote style="font-variant: small-caps"><strong>Footnotes</strong></blockquote> + +<p><a name="foot_11-1"></a>1. Were it not hazardous to treat processes of the Speculative Reason +as we deal with the vulgar dialectic of the Understanding, one would be +disposed to reply that if the above argument proves the existence of +three persons in the Godhead, it must equally prove the existence of +three persons in every man who reflects upon his conscious self. That +the Divine Mind, when engaged in the act of self-contemplation, must be +conceived under three relations is doubtless as true as that the human +mind, when so engaged, must be so conceived; but that these three +relations are so many objective realities is what Mr. Green asserts +indeed a few pages farther on, but what he nowhere attempts to prove.</p> + + + +<a name="chap12"></a> +<h2>Chapter XII</h2> + +<blockquote>Coleridge's position in his later years – His discourse – His influence +on contemporary thought – Final review of his intellectual work.</blockquote> + +<p>The critic who would endeavour to appreciate the position which +Coleridge fills in the history of literature and thought for the first +half of the nineteenth century must, if he possesses ordinary candour +and courage, begin, I think, with a confession. He must confess an +inability to comprehend the precise manner in which that position was +attained, and the precise grounds on which it was recognised. For vast +as were Coleridge's powers of thought and expression, and splendid, if +incomplete, as is the record which they have left behind them in his +works, they were never directed to purposes of instruction or +persuasion in anything like that systematic and concentrated manner +which is necessary to him who would found a school. Coleridge's +writings on philosophical and theological subjects were essentially +discursive, fragmentary, incomplete. Even when he professes an +intention of exhausting his subject and affects a logical arrangement, +it is not long before he forgets the design and departs from the order. +His disquisitions are in no sense connected treatises on the subjects +to which they relate. Brilliant <i>apercus,</i> gnomic sayings, flights +of fervid eloquence, infinitely suggestive reflections – of these there +is enough and to spare; but these, though an ample equipment for the +critic, are not sufficient for the constructive philosopher. Nothing, +it must be frankly said, in Coleridge's philosophical and theological +writings – nothing, that is to say, which appeals in them to the mere +intelligence – suffices to explain, at least to the appreciation of +posterity, the fact that he was surrounded during these closing years +of his life by an eager crowd of real or supposed disciples, including +two, at any rate, of the most remarkable personalities of the time. And +if nothing in Coleridge's writings serves to account for it, so neither +does anything traceable or tangible in the mere matter of his +conversations. This last point, however, is one which must be for the +present reserved. I wish for the moment to confine myself to the fact +of Coleridge's position during his later life at Highgate. To this we +have, as we all know, an extremely eminent witness, and one from whose +evidence most people, one may suppose, are by this time able to make +their own deductions in all matters relating to the persons with whom +he was brought into contact. Carlyle on Charles Lamb, few as the sour +sentences are, must always warn us to be careful how we follow Carlyle +"on" anybody whomsoever. But there is no evidence of any ill feeling on +Carlyle's part towards Coleridge – nothing but a humorous, kindly-contemptuous compassion for his weaknesses and eccentricities; and the +famous description in the <i>Life of Sterling</i> may be taken +therefore as a fairly accurate account of the man and the circumstances +to which it refers: – </p> + +<p>"Coleridge sat on the brow of Highgate Hill in those years, looking +down on London and its smoke tumult like a sage escaped from the +inanity of life's battle, attracting towards him the thoughts of +innumerable brave souls still engaged there. His express +contributions to poetry, philosophy, or any specific province of human +literature or enlightenment had been small and sadly intermittent; but +he had, especially among young inquiring men, a higher than literary, a +kind of prophetic or magician character. He was thought to hold – he +alone in England – the key of German and other Transcendentalisms; knew +the sublime secret of believing by the 'reason' what the +'understanding' had been obliged to fling out as incredible; and could +still, after Hume and Voltaire had done their best and worst with him, +profess himself an orthodox Christian, and say and print to the Church +of England, with its singular old rubrics and surplices at +Allhallowtide, <i>Esto perpetua.</i> A sublime man; who alone in those +dark days had saved his crown of spiritual manhood, escaping from the +black materialisms and revolutionary deluges with 'God, Freedom, +Immortality,' still his; a king of men. The practical intellects of the +world did not much heed him, or carelessly reckoned him a metaphysical +dreamer; but to the rising spirits of the young generation he had this +dusky sublime character, and sat there as a kind of Magus, girt in +mystery and enigma; his Dodona oak-grove (Mr. Gillman's house at +Highgate) whispering strange things, uncertain whether oracles or +jargon."</p> + +<p>The above quotation would suffice for my immediate purpose, +but it is impossible to deny oneself or one's readers the pleasure of a +refreshed recollection of the noble landscape-scene and the masterly +portrait that follow:</p> + +<p>"The Gillmans did not encourage much company or excitation of any sort +round their sage; nevertheless, access to him, if a youth did reverently +wish it, was not difficult. He would stroll about the pleasant garden +with you, sit in the pleasant rooms of the place – perhaps take you to +his own peculiar room, high up, with a rearward view, which was the +chief view of all. A really charming outlook in fine weather. Close at +hand wide sweeps of flowing leafy gardens, their few houses mostly +hidden, the very chimney-pots veiled under blossoming umbrage, flowed +gloriously down hill; gloriously issuing in wide-tufted undulating +plain country, rich in all charms of field and town. Waving blooming +country of the brightest green, dotted all over with handsome villas, +handsome groves crossed by roads and human traffic, here inaudible, or +heard only as a musical hum; and behind all swam, under olive-tinted +haze, the illimitable limitary ocean of London, with its domes and +steeples definite in the sun, big Paul's and the many memories attached +to it hanging high over all. Nowhere of its kind could you see a grander +prospect on a bright summer day, with the set of the air going southward + – southward, and so draping with the city smoke not <i>you</i> but the +city."</p> + +<p>Then comes the invariable final touch, the one dash of black – or green, +shall we call it – without which the master left no picture that had a +human figure in the foreground: – </p> + +<p>"Here for hours would Coleridge talk concerning all conceivable or +inconceivable things; and liked nothing better than to have an +intelligent, or, failing that, even a silent and patient human +listener. He distinguished himself to all that ever heard him as at +least the most surprising talker extant in this world, – and to some +small minority, by no means to all, as the most excellent."</p> + +<p>Then follows the well-known, wonderfully vivid, cynically pathetic, +sketch of the man: – </p> + +<p>"The good man – he was now getting old, towards sixty perhaps, and +gave you the idea of a life that had been full of sufferings; a +life heavy-laden, half-vanquished, still swimming painfully in +seas of manifold physical and other bewilderment. Brow and +head were round and of massive weight, but the face was flabby and +irresolute. The deep eyes, of a light hazel, were as full of sorrow as +of inspiration; confused pain looked mildly from them, as in a kind of +mild astonishment. The whole figure and air, good and amiable +otherwise, might be called flabby and irresolute; expressive of +weakness under possibility of strength. He hung loosely on his limbs, +with knees bent, and stooping attitude; in walking he rather shuffled +than decisively stept; and a lady once remarked he never could fix +which side of the gardenwalk would suit him best, but continually +shifted, corkscrew fashion, and kept trying both; a heavy-laden, high-aspiring, and surely much-suffering man. His voice, naturally soft and +good, had contracted itself into a plaintive snuffle and singsong; he +spoke as if preaching – you could have said preaching earnestly and +almost hopelessly the weightiest things. I still recollect his 'object' +and 'subject,' terms of continual recurrence in the Kantean province; +and how he sang and snuffled them into 'om-m-ject' and 'sum-m-mject,' +with a kind of solemn shake or quaver as he rolled along. [<a href="#foot_12-2">2</a>] No talk +in his century or in any other could be more surprising."</p> + +<p>Such, as he appeared to this half-contemptuous, half-compassionate, +but ever acute observer, was Coleridge at this the zenith of his +influence over the nascent thought of his day. Such to Carlyle +seemed the <i>manner</i> of the deliverance of the oracles; in his +view of their matter, as we all know from an equally well-remembered +passage, his tolerance disappears, and his account here, with all +its racy humour, is almost wholly impatient. Talk, "suffering no +interruption, however reverent," "hastily putting aside all foreign +additions, annotation, or most ingenuous desires for elucidation, as +well-meant superfluities which would never do;" talk "not flowing +anywhither, like a river, but spreading everywhither in inextricable +currents and regurgitations like a lake or sea;" a "confused +unintelligible flood of utterance, threatening to submerge all known +landmarks of thought and drown the world with you" – this, it must be +admitted, is not an easily recognisable description of the Word of +Life. Nor, certainly, does Carlyle's own personal experience of its +preaching and effects – he having heard the preacher talk "with eager +musical energy two stricken hours, his face radiant and moist, and +communicate no meaning whatsoever to any individual of his hearers," + – certain of whom, the narrator for one, "still kept eagerly +listening in hope, while the most had long before given up and formed +(if the room was large enough) humming groups of their own." "He +began anywhere," continues this irresistibly comic sketch; "you put +some question to him, made some suggestive observation; instead of +answering this, or decidedly setting out towards an answer of it, he +would accumulate formidable apparatus, logical swim-bladders, +transcendental life-preservers, and other precautionary and +vehiculatory gear for setting out; perhaps did at last get under way + – but was swiftly solicited, turned aside by the flame of some +radiant new game on this hand or on that into new courses, and ever +into new; and before long into all the universe, where it was +uncertain what game you would catch, or whether any." He +had, indeed, according to the dissatisfied listener, "not the least +talent for explaining this or anything to them; and you swam and +fluttered on the mistiest, wide, unintelligible deluge of things for +most part in a rather profitless uncomfortable manner." And the few +vivid phrases of eulogy which follow seem only to deepen by contrast +the prevailing hue of the picture. The "glorious islets" which were +sometimes seen to "rise out of the haze," the "balmy sunny islets of +the blest and the intelligible, at whose emergence the secondary +humming group would all cease humming and hang breathless upon the +eloquent words, till once your islet got wrapped in the mist again, and +they would recommence humming" – these, it seems to be suggested, but +rarely revealed themselves; but "eloquent, artistically expressive +words you always had; piercing radiances of a most subtle insight came +at intervals; tones of noble pious sympathy recognisable as pious +though strangely coloured, were never wanting long; but, in general, +you could not call this aimless cloud-capt, cloud-bound, lawlessly +meandering discourse, by the name of excellent talk, but only of +surprising.... The moaning sing-song of that theosophico-metaphysical +monotony left in you at last a very dreary feeling."</p> + +<p>It is tolerably clear, I think, that some considerable discount must +be allowed upon the sum of disparagement in this famous criticism. We have +learnt, indeed, to be more on the look-out for the disturbing influences +of temperament in the judgments of this atrabilious observer than was the +case when the <i>Life of Sterling</i> was written, and it is difficult +to doubt that the unfavourable strokes in the above-quoted description +have been unduly multiplied and deepened, partly in the mere +waywardness of a sarcastic humour, and partly perhaps from a less +excusable cause. It is always dangerous to accept one remarkable +talker's view of the characteristics of another; and if this is true of +men who merely compete with each other in the ordinary give-and-take of +the dinner-table epigrammatist and <i>raconteur,</i> the caution is +doubly necessary in the case of two rival prophets – two competing +oracles. There are those among us who hold that the conversation of the +Chelsea sage, in his later years, resembled his own description of the +Highgate philosopher's, in this, at any rate, that it was mightily +intolerant of interruption; and one is apt to suspect that at no time +of his life did Carlyle "understand duologue" much better than +Coleridge. It is probable enough, therefore, that the young lay-preacher did not quite relish being silenced by the elder, and that his +account of the sermons was coloured by the recollection that his own +remained undelivered. There is an abundance of evidence that the +"glorious islets" emerged far more often from the transcendental haze +than Carlyle would have us suppose. Hazlitt, a bitter assailant of +Coleridge's, and whose caustic remark that "his talk was excellent if +you let him start from no premisses and come to no conclusion" is cited +with approval by Carlyle, has elsewhere spoken of Coleridge as the only +person from whom he ever learned anything, has said of him that though +he talked on for ever you wished him to talk on for ever, that "his +thoughts did not seem to come with labour and effort, but as if borne +on the gusts of genius, and as if the wings of his imagination lifted +him from his feet." And besides this testimony to the eloquence which +Carlyle only but inadequately recognises, one should set for what it is +worth De Quincey's evidence to that consequence of thought which +Carlyle denies altogether. To De Quincey the complaint that Coleridge +wandered in his talk appeared unjust. According to him the great +discourser only "seemed to wander," and he seemed to wander the most +"when in fact his resistance to the wandering instinct was greatest, +viz. when the compass and huge circuit by which his illustrations moved +travelled farthest into remote regions before they began to revolve. +Long before this coming round commenced most people had lost him, and, +naturally enough, supposed that he had lost himself. They continued to +admire the separate beauty of the thoughts, but did not see their +relations to the dominant theme." De Quincey however, declares +positively in the faith of his "long and intimate knowledge of +Coleridge's mind, that logic the most severe was as inalienable from +his modes of thinking as grammar from his language."</p> + +<p>Nor should we omit the testimony of another, a more partial, perhaps, +but even better informed judge. The <i>Table Talk</i>, edited by Mr. +Nelson Coleridge, shows how pregnant, how pithy, how full of subtle +observation, and often also of playful humour, could be the talk of +the great discourser in its lighter and more colloquial forms. The +book indeed is, to the thinking of one, at any rate, of its frequent +readers, among the most delightful in the world. But thus speaks its +editor of his uncle's conversation in his more serious moods: – </p> + +<p>"To pass an entire day with Coleridge was a marvellous change indeed +[from the talk of daily life]. It was a Sabbath past expression, deep +and tranquil and serene. You came to a man who had travelled in many +countries and in critical times; who had seen and felt the world in +most of its ranks and in many of its vicissitudes and weaknesses; one +to whom all literature and art were absolutely subject; and to whom, +with a reasonable allowance as to technical details, all science was, +in a most extraordinary degree, familiar. Throughout a long-drawn +summer's day would this man talk to you in low, equable, but clear +and musical tones concerning things Iranian and divine; marshalling +all history, harmonising all experiment, probing the depths of your +consciousness, and revealing visions of glory and terror to the +imagination; but pouring withal such floods of light upon the mind +that you might for a season, like Paul, become blind in the very act +of conversion. And this he would do without so much as one allusion +to himself, without a word of reflection upon others, save when any +given art fell naturally in the way of his discourse; without one +anecdote that was not proof and illustration of a previous position; + – gratifying no passion, indulging no caprice, but, with a calm +mastery over your soul, leading you onward and onward for ever +through a thousand windings, yet with no pause, to some magnificent +point in which, as in a focus, all the parti-coloured rays of his +discourse should converge in light. In all these he was, in truth, +your teacher and guide; but in a little while you might forget that +he was other than a fellow-student and the companion of your way – +so playful was his manner, so simple his language, so affectionate the +glance of his eye!"</p> + +<p>Impressive, however, as these displays may have been, it is impossible +to suppose that their direct didactic value as discourses was at +all considerable. Such as it was, moreover, it was confined in all +probability to an extremely select circle of followers. A few +mystics of the type of Maurice, a few eager seekers after truth +like Sterling, may have gathered, or fancied they gathered, distinct +dogmatic instruction from the Highgate oracles; and no doubt, to the +extent of his influence over the former of these disciples, we may +justly credit Coleridge's discourses with having exercised a real if +only a transitory directive effect upon nineteenth-century thought. But +the terms in which his influence is sometimes spoken of appear, as far +as one can judge of the matter at this distance of time, to be greatly +exaggerated. To speak of it in the same way as we are – or were – +accustomed to speak of the influence of Carlyle, is to subject it to an +altogether inappropriate comparison. It is not merely that Coleridge +founded no recognisable school, for neither did Carlyle. It is that the +former can show absolutely nothing at all resembling that sort of power +which enabled the latter to lay hold upon all the youthful minds of his +time – minds of the most disparate orders and associated with the utmost +diversities of temperament, and detain them in a captivity which, brief +as it may have been in some cases, has in no case failed to leave its +marks behind it. Over a few spirits already prepared to receive them +Coleridge's teachings no doubt exerted power, but he led no soul +captive against its will. There are few middle-aged men of active +intelligence at the present day who can avoid a confession of having +"taken" Carlylism in their youth; but no mental constitutions not +predisposed to it could ever have caught Coleridgism at all. There is +indeed no moral theory of life, there are no maxims of conduct, such as +youth above all things craves for, in Coleridge's teaching. Apart from +the intrinsic difficulties of the task to which he invites his +disciples, it labours under a primary and essential disadvantage of +postponing moral to intellectual liberation. Contrive somehow or other +to attain to just ideas as to the capacities and limitations of the +human consciousness, considered especially in relation to its two +important and eternally distinct functions, the Reason and the +Understanding: and peace of mind shall in due time be added unto you. +That is in effect Coleridge's answer to the inquirer who consults him; +and if the distinction between the Reason and the Understanding were as +obvious as it is obscure to the average unmetaphysical mind, and of a +value as assured for the purpose to which Coleridge applies it as it is +uncertain, the answer would nevertheless send many a would-be disciple +sorrowful away. His natural impulse is to urge the oracle to tell him +whether there be not some one moral attitude which he can wisely and +worthily adopt towards the universe, whatever theory he may form of his +mental relations to it, or without forming any such theory at all. And +it was because Carlyle supplied, or was believed to supply an answer, +such as it was, to this universal question, that his train of +followers, voluntary and involuntary, permanent and temporary, has been +so large.</p> + +<p>It appears to me, therefore, on as careful an examination of +the point as the data admit of, that Coleridge's position in these +latter days of his life has been somewhat mythically exalted by the +generation which succeeded him. There are, I think, distinct traces of +a Coleridgian legend which has only slowly died out. The actual truth I +believe to be that Coleridge's position from 1818 or 1820 till his +death, though one of the greatest eminence, was in no sense one of the +highest, or even of any considerable influence. Fame and honour, in the +fullest measure, were no doubt his: in that matter, indeed, he was only +receiving payment of long-delayed arrears. The poetic school with which +he was, though not with entire accuracy, associated had outlived its +period of contempt and obloquy. In spite of the two quarterlies, the +Tory review hostile, its Whig rival coldly silent, the public had +recognised the high imaginative merit of <i>Christabel;</i> and who +knows but that if the first edition of the <i>Lyrical Ballads</i> had +appeared at this date instead of twenty years before, it would have +obtained a certain number of readers even among landsmen? [<a href="#foot_12-2">2</a>] But over +and above the published works of the poet there were those +extraordinary personal characteristics to which the fame of his works +of course attracted a far larger share than formerly of popular +attention. A remarkable man has more attractive power over the mass of +mankind than the most remarkable of books, and it was because the +report of Coleridge among those who knew him was more stimulating to +public curiosity than even the greatest of his poems, that his +celebrity in these latter years attained such proportions. Wordsworth +said that though "he had seen many men do wonderful things, Coleridge +was the only wonderful man he had ever met," and it was not the doer of +wonderful things but the wonderful man that English society in those +days went out for to see. Seeing would have been enough, but for a +certain number there was hearing too, with the report of it for all; +and it is not surprising that fame of the marvellous discourser should, +in mere virtue of his extraordinary power of improvised speech, his +limitless and untiring mastery of articulate words, have risen to a +height to which writers whose only voice is in their pens can never +hope to attain.</p> + +<p>A reputation of that kind, however, must necessarily perish with its +possessor; and Coleridge's posthumous renown has grown, his place in +English literature has become more assured, if it has not been even +fixed higher, since his death than during his lifetime. This +is, in part no doubt, one among the consequences of those very defects +of character which so unfortunately limited his actual achievements. He +has been credited by faith, as it were, with those famous "unwritten +books" of which he assured Charles Lamb that the titles alone would +fill a volume, and such "popular reputation," in the strict sense of +the word, as he has left behind him, is measured rather by what he was +thought capable of doing than by what he did. By serious students, +however, the real worth of Coleridge will be differently estimated. For +them his peculiar value to English literature is not only undiminished +by the incompleteness of his work; it has been, in a certain sense, +enhanced thereby. Or, perhaps, it would be more strictly accurate to +say that the value could not have existed without the incompleteness. A +Coleridge with the faculty of concentration, and the habit of method +superadded – a Coleridge capable of becoming possessed by any one form +of intellectual energy to the exclusion of all others – might, indeed, +have left behind him a more enduring reputation as a philosopher, and +possibly (although this, for reasons already stated, is, in my own +opinion, extremely doubtful) bequeathed to his countrymen more poetry +destined to live; but, unquestionably, he would never have been able to +render that precise service to modern thought and literature which, in +fact, they owe to him. To have exercised his vivifying and fertilising +influence over the minds of others his intellect was bound to be of the +dispersive order; it was essential that he should "take all knowledge +to be his province," and that that eager, subtle, and penetrative mind +should range as freely as it did over subject after subject of human +interest; – illuminating each of them in turn with those rays of true +critical insight which, amid many bewildering cross-lights and some few +downright <i>ignes fatui,</i> flash forth upon us from all Coleridge's +work.</p> + +<p>Of the personal weaknesses which prevented the just development +of the powers, enough, perhaps, has been incidentally said in the +course of this volume. But, in summing up his history, I shall not, I +trust, be thought to judge the man too harshly in saying that, though +the natural disadvantages of wretched health, almost from boyhood +upward, must, in common fairness, be admitted in partial excuse for his +failure, they do not excuse it altogether. It is difficult not to feel +that Coleridge's character, apart altogether from defects of physical +constitution, was wanting in manliness of fibre. His willingness to +accept assistance at the hands of others is too manifestly displayed +even at the earlier and more robust period of his life. It would be a +mistake, of course, in dealing with a literary man of Coleridge's era, +to apply the same standards as obtain in our own days. Wordsworth, as +we have seen, made no scruple to accept the benevolences of the +Wedgwoods. Southey, the type of independence and self-help, was, for +some years, in receipt of a pension from a private source. But +Coleridge, as Miss Meteyard's disclosures have shown, was at all times +far more willing to depend upon others, and was far less scrupulous +about soliciting their bounty, than was either of his two friends. Had +he shared more of the spirit which made Johnson refuse to owe to the +benevolence of others what Providence had enabled him to do for +himself, it might have been better, no doubt, for the world and for the +work which he did therein.</p> + +<p>But when we consider what that work was, how varied and how wonderful, +it seems idle – nay, it seems ungrateful and ungracious – to speculate +too curiously on what further or other benefits this great intellect +might have conferred upon mankind, had its possessor been endowed with +those qualities of resolution and independence which he lacked. That +Coleridge so often only <i>shows</i> the way, and so seldom guides our +steps along it to the end, is no just ground of complaint. It would be +as unreasonable to complain of a beacon-light that it is not a steam-tug, +and forget in the incompleteness of its separate services the glory of +their number. It is a more reasonable objection that the light itself +is too often liable to obscuration, – that it stands erected upon a rock +too often enshrouded by the mists of its encircling sea. But even this +objection should not too greatly weigh with us. It would be wiser and +better for us to dwell rather upon its splendour and helpfulness in the +hours of its efficacy, to think how vast is then the expanse of waters +which it illuminates, and its radiance how steady and serene.</p> + +<blockquote style="font-variant: small-caps"><strong>Footnotes</strong></blockquote> + +<p><a name="foot_12-1"></a>1. No one who recollects the equally singular manner in which another +most distinguished metaphysician – the late Dean Hansel – was wont to +quaver forth his admirably turned and often highly eloquent phrases of +philosophical exposition, can fail to be reminded of him by the above +description. No two temperaments or histories however could be more +dissimilar. The two philosophers resembled each other in nothing save +the "om-mject" and "sum-mject" of their studies.</p> + +<p><a name="foot_12-2"></a>2. The Longmans told Coleridge that the greater part of the first +edition of the Lyrical Ballads had been sold to seafaring men, who, +having heard of the <i>Ancient Mariner</i>, took the volume for a naval +song-book.</p> + + + +<a name="index"></a> +<h2>Index</h2> + +<div class="index"> + +<p>Adams, Dr.,</p> + +<p><i>Aeolian Harp,</i><br /> + circumstances under which it was written,<br /> + Coleridge's opinion of,</p> + +<p><i>Aids to Reflection,</i><br /> + its popularity,<br /> + its value as a spiritual manual,<br /> + its inferiority from a literary point of view,</p> + +<p>Allan Bank,</p> + +<p>Allsop, Mr. Thomas,</p> + +<p><i>Ancient Mariner,</i><br /> + how and when first conceived,<br /> + its uniqueness,<br /> + Wordsworth's account of its origin<br /> + and of his suggestions,<br /> + a sublime "pot-boiler,"<br /> + realistic force of its narrative,<br /> + its vividness of imagery,<br /> + its wonderful word-pictures,<br /> + its evenness of execution,<br /> + examples of its consummate art,<br /> + its chief characteristics,</p> + +<p>Anecdotes,</p> + +<p>Ball, Sir Alexander,</p> + +<p>Beaumont, Lady,</p> + +<p>Berkeley,</p> + +<p><i>Biographia Literaria,</i><br /> + its interest, critical and illustrative,<br /> + its main value,<br /> + its analysis of the principles of poetry,<br /> + its examination of Wordsworth's theory,<br /> + its contents,</p> + +<p><i>Blackwood's Magazine,</i><br /> + Coleridge's contributions to,</p> + +<p>Bonaparte,</p> + +<p><i>Borderers</i> (Wordsworth's),</p> + +<p>Bowles, William Lisle,</p> + +<p>Burke,<br /> + sonnet to,</p> + +<p>Byron,</p> + +<p>Calne, Coleridge at,</p> + +<p><i>Cambridge Intelligencer </i>(Flower's),</p> + +<p>Carlyle, description of Coleridge by,</p> + +<p>Carrlyon, Dr.,<br /> + reminiscences of Coleridge in Germany by,</p> + +<p><i>Christabel,</i><br /> + Coleridge's opinion of,<br /> + its unfinished condition,<br /> + the lines on the "spell,"<br /> + its high place as a work of creative art,<br /> + its fragmentary beauties,<br /> + the description of Christabel's chamber,<br /> + its main idea,<br /> + outline of the unfinished parts,<br /> + Lamb and Hartley Coleridge on,<br /> + its perfection from the metrical point of view,<br /> + publication of the second part,<br /> + its popularity,<br /> + Coleridge's great desire to complete it,</p> + +<p><i>Circassian Love Chant</i>,<br /> + its charm of melody,</p> + +<p>Coleridge, Samuel Taylor.<br /> + His biographers,<br /> + birth and family history,<br /> + his boyhood and school days,<br /> + early childhood,<br /> + death of his father,<br /> + goes to Christ's Hospital,<br /> + goes to Jesus College, Cambridge,<br /> + wins the Browne Gold Medal,<br /> + leaves Cambridge suddenly and enlists in the army,<br /> + his discharge,<br /> + returns to Cambridge,<br /> + his meeting with Southey and Sara Fricker (his future wife),<br /> + writes the <i>Fall of Robespierre</i> with Southey,<br /> + leaves Cambridge,<br /> + delivers the Bristol lectures,<br /> + marries Sara Fricker at Bristol,<br /> + writes the <i>Aeolian Harp</i>,<br /> + plunges into politics and journalism,<br /> + projects the <i>Watchman</i> and goes on a canvassing tour,<br /> + preaches Unitarian sermons by the way,<br /> + brings out the <i>Watchman</i>,<br /> + retires to a cottage in Somersetshire with Charles Lloyd,<br /> + his meeting with Wordsworth,<br /> + cooling of his revolutionary enthusiasm,<br /> + his intercourse with Wordsworth,<br /> + writes <i>Osorio</i>,<br /> + his rambles with Wordsworth among the Quantock Hills,<br /> + projects the <i>Lyrical Ballads</i>,<br /> + writes the <i>Ancient Mariner</i>,<br /> + <i>Christabel</i>,<br /> + <i>Love</i>,<br /> + <i>Kubla Khan</i>,<br /> + undertakes the duties of a Unitarian preacher at Shrewsbury,<br /> + accepts an annuity from the two Wedgwoods,<br /> + goes to Germany with the Wordsworths,<br /> + returns to England after a year's absence,<br /> + translates Schiller's <i>Wallenstein</i>,<br /> + devotes himself again to journalism,<br /> + goes to the Lake country,<br /> + takes opium as an anodyne,<br /> + writes the <i>Ode to Dejection</i>,<br /> + goes on a tour with Thomas Wedgwood,<br /> + visits the Wordsworths at Grasmere,<br /> + his illness there,<br /> + goes to Malta,<br /> + ill effects of his stay there,<br /> + becomes Secretary to the Governor of the island,<br /> + goes to Italy,<br /> + returns to England after two and a half years' absence,<br /> + his wretched condition of mind and body,<br /> + estrangement from his wife,<br /> + domestic unhappiness,<br /> + meeting with De Quincey,<br /> + pecuniary embarrassments,<br /> + his lectures at the Royal Institution,<br /> + lives with Wordsworth at Allan Bank,<br /> + founds and edits the <i>Friend</i>,<br /> + delivers lectures on Shakespeare,<br /> + returns to journalism,<br /> + his necessities,<br /> + loses his annuity,<br /> + neglect of his family,<br /> + successful production of his play <i>Remorse</i>,<br /> + lectures again at Bristol,<br /> + retires to Calne with Mr. Morgan,<br /> + more financial troubles,<br /> + lives with Dr. Gillman at Highgate,<br /> + undergoes medical treatment for the opium habit,<br /> + returning health and vigour,<br /> + renewed literary activity,<br /> + writes the <i>Biographia Literaria</i>,<br /> + lectures again in London,<br /> + more money troubles,<br /> + publishes <i>Aids to Reflection</i>,<br /> + accompanies Wordsworth on a tour up the Rhine,<br /> + his declining years,<br /> + contemplation of his approaching end,<br /> + his death,</p> + +<p>Poet and Thinker.<br /> + His early bent towards poetry and metaphysics,<br /> + his prose style,<br /> + his early poems, their merits and defects,<br /> + his sonnets,<br /> + Coleridge at his best,<br /> + untimely decline of his poetic impulse,<br /> + Wordsworth's great influence on him,<br /> + Coleridge's mastery of the true ballad manner,<br /> + estimate of his poetic work,<br /> + comparison with Byron and Wordsworth,<br /> + his wonderful power of melody,<br /> + his great projects,<br /> + his critical powers,<br /> + his criticism of Shakespeare,<br /> + his philosophy,<br /> + his contemplated "Great Work,"<br /> + his materials for various poems,<br /> + his metaphysics and theology,<br /> + his discourses,<br /> + exaggerated notions of his position and influence,<br /> + his "unwritten books,"</p> + +<p> Precocious boyhood,<br /> + descriptions of him at various times,<br /> + his voice,<br /> + his conduct as a husband,<br /> + religious nature,<br /> + revolutionary enthusiasm,<br /> + consciousness of his great powers,<br /> + generous admiration for the gifts of others,<br /> + his womanly softness,<br /> + his pride in his personal appearance,<br /> + his contempt for money,<br /> + his ill-health,<br /> + his opium-eating,<br /> + his restlessness,<br /> + best portrait of him,<br /> + his unbusinesslike nature,<br /> + sorrows of his life,<br /> + his laudanum excesses,<br /> + his talk,<br /> + his weaknesses,</p> + +<p>Coleridge, Mrs.,</p> + +<p>Coleridge, Rev. Derwent,</p> + +<p>Coleridge, Rev. George,</p> + +<p>Coleridge, Hartley,</p> + +<p>Coleridge, Rev. John,</p> + +<p>Coleridge, Luke,</p> + +<p>Coleridge, Nelson,</p> + +<p>Coleridge, Sarah,</p> + +<p><i>Coleridge and Opium Eating</i> (De Quincey's),</p> + +<p><i>Condones ad Populum </i>(Bristol Lectures),<br /> + their warmth of language,<br /> + evidence of deep thought and reasoning in,<br /> + their crudeness,</p> + +<p>Consulate, Coleridge on the French,</p> + +<p>Cottle, Joseph,</p> + +<p><i>Courier, The,</i></p> + +<p><i>Dark Ladie,</i></p> + +<p><i>Dejection, Ode to,</i><br /> + Coleridge's swan song,<br /> + its promise,<br /> + Coleridge's spiritual and moral losses bewailed in,<br /> + stanzas from,<br /> + biographical value of,</p> + +<p>De Quincey,</p> + +<p>Descartes,</p> + +<p><i>Descriptive Sketches </i>(Wordsworth's),</p> + +<p><i>Devil's Thoughts,</i></p> + +<p><i>Early Years and Late Reflections</i> (Dr. Carrlyon's),</p> + +<p><i>Effusions,</i></p> + +<p>Erasmus,</p> + +<p><i>Essays on his own Times,</i></p> + +<p><i>Eve of St Agnes</i> (Keats's),</p> + +<p><i>Excursion</i> (Wordsworth's),</p> + +<p><i>Fall of Robespierre</i>,</p> + +<p><i>Fears in Solitude</i>,</p> + +<p><i>Fire, Famine and Slaughter</i>,</p> + +<p>Fox, Letters to,</p> + +<p>France, Coleridge on,<br /> + ode to,</p> + +<p>Fricker, Edith,<br /> + Mary,<br /> + Sara,</p> + +<p><i>Friend, The</i>,<br /> + Coleridge's object in starting it,<br /> + its short-lived career,<br /> + causes of its failure,<br /> + compared with the <i>Spectator</i>,</p> + +<p><i>Frost at Midnight</i> (lines),</p> + +<p>Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire,<br /> + Ode to,</p> + +<p>Germany, Coleridge and Wordsworth in,</p> + +<p>Gibbon,</p> + +<p>Gillman, Mr.,</p> + +<p>Green, Mr. J. H.,</p> + +<p>Grenville, Lord,</p> + +<p>Greta Hall, description of,</p> + +<p><i>Group of Englishmen</i> (Miss Meteyard's),</p> + +<p>Harz Mountains, Coleridge's tour through the,</p> + +<p>Hazlitt,</p> + +<p>Hume,</p> + +<p><i>Joan of Arc</i> (Southey's), Coleridge's contribution to,</p> + +<p>Johnson, Samuel,</p> + +<p><i>Juvenile Poems</i>,</p> + +<p>Kean,</p> + +<p>Keats,<br />Coleridge's meeting with and description of,</p> + +<p>Keswick,</p> + +<p><i>Kosciusko</i> (Sonnet),</p> + +<p><i>Kubla Khan</i>,<br /> + a wild dream-poem,<br /> + its curious origin,<br /> + when written,</p> + +<p><i>Lake Poets</i> (De Quincey's),</p> + +<p>Lamb, Charles,</p> + +<p>Lamb, Mary,</p> + +<p><i>Lay Sermons</i>,</p> + +<p>"Lear,": Coleridge on,</p> + +<p>Lectures, Coleridge's,<br /> + at Bristol,<br /> + at the Royal Institution,<br /> + on Shakespeare and Milton,<br /> + at Flower de Luce Court,<br /> + extempore lecture,</p> + +<p>Le Grice, Charles,</p> + +<p><i>Liberal, The</i>,</p> + +<p><i>Lines on ascending the Bracken</i>,</p> + +<p><i>Lines to William Wordsworth</i>,</p> + +<p><i>Literary Remains</i>,</p> + +<p>Lloyd, Charles,</p> + +<p>Locke,</p> + +<p><i>Love</i>,<br /> + fascination of melody in,</p> + +<p>Lovell, Robert,</p> + +<p><i>Lover's Resolution</i>,</p> + +<p>Luther,</p> + +<p><i>Lyrical Ballads</i>,<br /> + origin of,<br /> + Coleridge's contributions to,<br /> + appearance of,<br /> + anecdote concerning,</p> + +<p>Malta, Coleridge's stay at,</p> + +<p>Maurice,</p> + +<p>Metaphysics and theology;<br /> + Coleridge's,</p> + +<p>Meteyard, Miss,</p> + +<p>Milton,<br /> + lectures on Shakespeare and,</p> + +<p><i>Monody on the Death of Chatterton</i>,</p> + +<p>Montagu, Mr. and Mrs.,</p> + +<p>Morgan, Mr. John,</p> + +<p><i>Morning Post, The</i>,<br /> + Coleridge's connection with,</p> + +<p>Nether Stowey, Coleridge at,</p> + +<p><i>New Monthly Magazine</i>,</p> + +<p><i>Nightingale</i>,</p> + +<p><i>Omniana</i> (Southey's),<br /> + Coleridge's contribution to,</p> + +<p>Opium,<br /> + Coleridge's resort to,<br /> + origin of the habit,<br /> + De Quincey on,</p> + +<p><i>Pains of Sleep</i>,</p> + +<p>"Pantisocraey,"</p> + +<p>Parry, Coleridge's fellow-student in Germany,</p> + +<p><i>Peau de Chagrin</i> (Balzac's),</p> + +<p>Philosophy, Coleridge's,<br /> + (see <i>Spiritual Philosophy</i>)</p> + +<p><i>Pilgrimage</i> (Purchas's),</p> + +<p>Pitt,<br /> + sonnet to,</p> + +<p>Pius VII., Pope,</p> + +<p><i>Poems on Various Subjects</i>,</p> + +<p><i>Poetical and Dramatic Works</i>,</p> + +<p>Poetry and the Fine Arts, Coleridge's lectures on,</p> + +<p>"Polonius,"<br /> + Coleridge's estimate of the character of,</p> + +<p>Poole, Mr. Thomas,</p> + +<p><i>Prometheus</i>, Coleridge's paper on,</p> + +<p>Quantock Hills, Coleridge and Wordsworth among the,</p> + +<p><i>Recantation</i>,</p> + +<p><i>Recollections</i> (Cottle's),</p> + +<p><i>Recollections of a Literary Life</i> (Miss Mitford's)</p> + +<p><i>Reflections on having left a Place of Retirement</i>,</p> + +<p><i>Religious Musings</i>,</p> + +<p><i>Remorse</i>,</p> + +<p>Revolution, the French,</p> + +<p><i>Robbers</i>,</p> + +<p>Rome, Coleridge in,</p> + +<p>Rousseau,</p> + +<p>Royal Institution, Coleridge's lectures at the,</p> + +<p>Schiller,</p> + +<p>Schlegel,</p> + +<p>Scott, Sir Walter,</p> + +<p><i>Sermons, Lay</i>,</p> + +<p>Shakespeare,<br /> + lectures on,<br /> + criticisms on,</p> + +<p>Shakespearianism, German,</p> + +<p>Shelley,</p> + +<p>Sheridan,</p> + +<p>Shrewsbury,<br /> + Coleridge's preaching in,</p> + +<p><i>Sibylline Leaves</i>,</p> + +<p>Slave Trade,<br /> + Coleridge's Greek Ode on the,</p> + +<p><i>Songs of the Pixies</i>,</p> + +<p><i>Sonnets on Eminent Characters</i>,</p> + +<p>Sotheby, Mr.,</p> + +<p>Southey,</p> + +<p>Southey, Cuthbert,</p> + +<p>Southey, Edith,</p> + +<p><i>Spectator</i>,</p> + +<p><i>Spiritual Philosophy</i> (Green's),<br /> + an exposition of Coleridge's Philosophy,<br /> + Coleridge's great fundamental principle,<br /> + the reason and the understanding,<br /> + will, not thought, the ultimate fact of self-consciousness,<br /> + a philosophy of Realism,<br /> + philosophy valued by Coleridge mainly as an organon of religion,<br /> + growth of the soul,<br /> + the idea of God,<br /> + idea of the Trinity,<br /> + "a guidebook written in hieroglyphics,"</p> + +<p><i>Statesman's Manual</i>,</p> + +<p><i>Sterling, Life of</i> (Carlyle's),</p> + +<p>Sterne,</p> + +<p>Stuart, Mr. Daniel,</p> + +<p>Swinburne's praise of Coleridge's lyrics,</p> + +<p><i>Table Talk</i>,</p> + +<p>Theology and metaphysics, Coleridge's system of,</p> + +<p>Unitarian, Coleridge as a,</p> + +<p><i>Visionary Hope</i>,</p> + +<p>Voltaire,</p> + +<p><i>Voyages</i> (Shelvocke's),</p> + +<p><i>Wallenstein</i>, Coleridge's translation of,</p> + +<p>Warburton,</p> + +<p><i>Watchman</i>,</p> + +<p>Wedgwood, Josiah,</p> + +<p>Wedgwood, Thomas,</p> + +<p>Wordsworth,</p> + +<p>Wordsworth, Dorothy,</p> + +<p><i>Year, Ode to the Departing</i>,</p> + +<p><i>Zapolya</i>,</p> + +</div> + +<p align="center"><strong>The End.</strong></p> + + + + + + + + +<pre> + +End of Project Gutenberg's English Men of Letters: Coleridge, by H. 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Do not change or edit the +header without written permission. + +Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the +eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file. Included is +important information about your specific rights and restrictions in +how the file may be used. You can also find out about how to make a +donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved. + + +**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts** + +**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971** + +*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!***** + + +Title: English Men of Letters: Coleridge + +Author: H. D. Traill + +Release Date: November, 2004 [EBook #6916] +[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule] +[This file was first posted on February 10, 2003] + +Edition: 10 + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: Unicode UTF-8 + +*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS: COLERIDGE *** + + + + +Produced by Curtis A. Weyant, Charles Franks, +and the Distributed Proofreading Team. + + + + +ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS + +COLERIDGE + +BY + +H. D. TRAILL + + + + +PREFATORY NOTE. + + +In a tolerably well-known passage in one of his essays De Quincey +enumerates the multiform attainments and powers of Coleridge, and the +corresponding varieties of demand made by them on any one who should +aspire to become this many-sided man's biographer. The description is +slightly touched with the humorous hyperbole characteristic of its +author; but it is in substance just, and I cannot but wish that it were +possible, within the limits of a preface, to set out the whole of it in +excuse for the many inevitable shortcomings of this volume. Having thus +made an "exhibit" of it, there would only remain to add that the +difficulties with which De Quincey confronts an intending biographer of +Coleridge must necessarily be multiplied many-fold by the conditions +under which this work is here attempted. No complete biography of +Coleridge, at least on any important scale of dimensions, is in +existence; no critical appreciation of his work _as a whole_, and +as correlated with the circumstances and affected by the changes of his +life, has, so far as I am aware, been attempted. To perform either of +these two tasks adequately, or even with any approach to adequacy, a +writer should at least have the elbow-room of a portly volume. To +attempt the two together, therefore, and to attempt them within the +limits prescribed to the manuals of this series, is an enterprise +which I think should claim, from all at least who are not offended by +its audacity, an almost unbounded indulgence. + +The supply of material for a _Life_ of Coleridge is fairly plentiful, +though it is not very easily come by. For the most part it needs to be +hunted up or fished up--those accustomed to the work will appreciate +the difference between the two processes--from a considerable variety +of contemporary documents. Completed biography of the poet-philosopher +there is none, as has been said, in existence; and the one volume of +the unfinished _Life_ left us by Mr. Gillman--a name never to be +mentioned with disrespect, however difficult it may sometimes be to +avoid doing so, by any one who honours the name and genius of +Coleridge--covers, and that in but a loose and rambling fashion, no +more than a few years. Mr. Cottle's _Recollections of Southey, +Wordsworth, and Coleridge_ contains some valuable information on +certain points of importance, as also does the _Letters, Conversations, +etc., of S. T. C._ by Mr. Allsop. Miss Meteyard's _Group of Eminent +Englishmen_ throws much light on the relations between Coleridge and +his early patrons the Wedgwoods. Everything, whether critical or +biographical, that De Quincey wrote on Coleridgian matters requires, +with whatever discount, to be carefully studied. _The Life of Wordsworth,_ +by the Bishop of St. Andrews; _The Correspondence of Southey;_ +the Rev. Derwent Coleridge's brief account of his father's life and +writings; and the prefatory memoir prefixed to the 1880 edition of +Coleridge's _Poetical and Dramatic Works_, have all had to be +consulted. But, after all, there remain several tantalising gaps in +Coleridge's life which refuse to be bridged over; and one cannot but +think that there must be enough unpublished matter in the possession +of his relatives and the representatives of his friends and +correspondents to enable some at least, though doubtless not all, of +these missing links to be supplied. Perhaps upon a fitting occasion +and for an adequate purpose these materials would be forthcoming. + + + + +CONTENTS. + + + +_POETICAL PERIOD._ + +CHAPTER I. +[1772-1794.] +Birth, parentage, and early years--Christ's Hospital--Jesus College, +Cambridge. + +CHAPTER II. +[1794-1797.] +The Bristol Lectures--Marriage--Life at Clevedon--The _Watchman_-- +Retirement to Stowey--Introduction to Wordsworth. + +CHAPTER III. +[1797-1799.] +Coleridge and Wordsworth--Publication of the _Lyrical Ballads_--The +_Ancient Mariner_--The first part of _Christabel_--Decline of +Coleridge's poetic impulse--Final review of his poetry. + + +_CRITICAL PERIOD._ + +CHAPTER IV. +[1799-1800.] +Visit to Germany--Life at Göttingen--Return--Explores the Lake country-- +London--The _Morning Post_--Coleridge as a journalist--Retirement to +Keswick. + +CHAPTER V. +[1800-1804.] +Life at Keswick--Second part of _Christabel_--Failing health--Resort +to opium--The _Ode to Dejection_--Increasing restlessness--Visit to +Malta. + +CHAPTER VI. +[1806-1809.] +Stay at Malta--Its injurious effects--Return to England--Meeting with De +Quincey--Residence in London--First series of lectures. + +CHAPTER VII. +[1809-1810.] +Return to the Lakes--From Keswick to Grasmere--With Wordsworth at Allan +Bank--The _Friend_--Quits the Lake country for ever. + +CHAPTER VIII. +[1810-1816.] +London again--Second recourse to journalism--The _Courier_ articles-- +The Shakespeare lectures--Production of _Remorse_--At Bristol again +as lecturer--Residence at Calne--Increasing ill health and embarrassments +--Retirement to Mr. Gillman's. + + +_METAPHYSICAL AND THEOLOGICAL PERIOD._ + +CHAPTER IX. +[1816-1818.] +Life at Highgate--Renewed activity--Publications and republications--The +_Biographia Literaria_--The lectures of 1818--Coleridge as a +Shakespearian critic. + +CHAPTER X. +[1818-1834.] +Closing years--Temporary renewal of money troubles--The _Aids to +Refection_--Growing weakness-Visit to Germany with the Wordsworths-- +Last illness and death. + +CHAPTER XI. +Coleridge's metaphysics and theology--_The Spiritual Philosophy_ +of Mr. Green. + +CHAPTER XII. +Coleridge's position in his later years--His discourse--His +influence on contemporary thought--Final review of his intellectual +work. + +INDEX. + + + + +COLERIDGE. + + + + + +CHAPTER I. + +Birth, parentage, and early years--Christ's Hospital--Jesus College, +Cambridge. + +[1772-1794.] + + +On the 21st of October 1772 there was added to that roll of famous +Englishmen of whom Devonshire boasts the parentage a new and not its +least illustrious name. SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE was the son of the Rev. +John Coleridge, vicar of Ottery St. Mary in that county, and head +master of Henry VIII.'s Free Grammar School in the same town. He was +the youngest child of a large family. To the vicar, who had been twice +married, his first wife had borne three children, and his second ten. +Of these latter, however, one son died in infancy; four others, +together with the only daughter of the family, passed away before +Samuel had attained his majority; and thus only three of his brothers, +James, Edward, and George Coleridge, outlived the eighteenth century. +The first of these three survivors became the father of Henry Nelson +Coleridge--who married his cousin Sara, the poet's accomplished +daughter, and edited his uncle's posthumous works--and of the late Mr. +Justice Coleridge, himself the father of the present Lord Chief-Justice +of England. Edward, the second of the three, went, like his eldest +brother William, to Pembroke College, Oxford, and like him took orders; +and George, also educated at the same college and for the same +profession, succeeded eventually to his father's benefice and school. +The vicar himself appears from all accounts to have been a man of more +mark than most rural incumbents, and probably than a good many +schoolmasters of his day. He was a Hebrew scholar of some eminence, and +the compiler of a Latin grammar, in which, among other innovations +designed to simplify the study of the language for "boys just +initiated," he proposed to substitute for the name of "ablative" that +of "quale-quare-quidditive case." The mixture of amiable simplicity and +not unamiable pedantry to which this stroke of nomenclature testifies +was further illustrated in his practice of diversifying his sermons to +his village flock with Hebrew quotations, which he always commended to +their attention as "the immediate language of the Holy Ghost"--a +practice which exposed his successor, himself a learned man, to the +complaint of his rustic parishioners, that for all his erudition no +"immediate language of the Holy Ghost" was ever to be heard from +_him_. On the whole the Rev. John Coleridge appears to have been a +gentle and kindly eccentric, whose combination of qualities may have +well entitled him to be compared, as his famous son was wont in after- +life to compare him, to Parson Adams. + +Of the poet's mother we know little; but it is to be gathered from such +information as has come to us through Mr. Gillman from Coleridge +himself that, though reputed to have been a "woman of strong mind," she +exercised less influence on the formation of her son's mind and +character than has frequently been the case with the not remarkable +mothers of remarkable men. "She was," says Mr. Gillman, "an uneducated +woman, industriously attentive to her household duties, and devoted to +the care of her husband and family. Possessing none even of the most +common accomplishments of her day, she had neither love nor sympathy +for the display of them in others. She disliked, as she would say, your +'harpsichord ladies,' and strongly tried to impress upon her sons their +little value" (that is, of the accomplishments) "in their choice of +wives." And the final judgment upon her is that she was "a very good +woman, though, like Martha, over careful in many things; very ambitious +for the advancement of her sons in life, but wanting, perhaps, that +flow of heart which her husband possessed so largely." Of Coleridge's +boyhood and school-days we are fortunate in being able to construct an +unusually clear and complete idea. Both from his own autobiographic +notes, from the traditionary testimony of his family, and from the no +less valuable evidence of his most distinguished schoolfellow, we know +that his youthful character and habits assign him very conspicuously to +that perhaps somewhat small class of eminent men whose boyhood has +given distinct indications of great things to come. Coleridge is as +pronounced a specimen of this class as Scott is of its opposite. Scott +has shown the world how commonplace a boyhood may precede a maturity of +extraordinary powers. In Coleridge's case a boy of truly extraordinary +qualities was father to one of the most remarkable of men. As the +youngest of ten children (or of thirteen, reckoning the vicar's family +of three by his first wife), Coleridge attributes the early bent of his +disposition to causes the potency of which one may be permitted to +think that he has somewhat exaggerated. It is not quite easy to believe +that it was only through "certain jealousies of old Molly," his brother +Frank's "dotingly fond nurse," and the infusions of these jealousies +into his brother's mind, that he was drawn "from life in motion to life +in thought and sensation." The physical impulses of boyhood, where they +exist in vigour, are not so easily discouraged, and it is probable that +they were naturally weaker and the meditative tendency stronger than +Coleridge in after-life imagined. But to continue: "I never played," he +proceeds, "except by myself, and then only acting over what I had been +reading or fancying, or half one, half the other" (a practice common +enough, it may be remarked, among boys of by no means morbidly +imaginative habit), "cutting down weeds and nettles with a stick, as +one of the seven champions of Christendom. Alas! I had all the +simplicity, all the docility of the little child, but none of the +child's habits. I never thought as a child--never had the language of a +child." So it fared with him during the period of his home instruction, +the first eight years of his life; and his father having, as scholar +and schoolmaster, no doubt noted the strange precocity of his youngest +son, appears to have devoted especial attention to his training. "In my +ninth year," he continues, "my most dear, most revered father died +suddenly. O that I might so pass away, if, like him, I were an +Israelite without guile. The image of my father, my revered, kind, +learned, simple-hearted father, is a religion to me." + +Before he had attained his tenth year a presentation to Christ's +Hospital was obtained for him by that eminent judge Mr. Justice Buller, +a former pupil of his father's; and he was entered at the school on the +18th July 1782. His early bent towards poetry, though it displayed +itself in youthful verse of unusual merit, is a less uncommon and +arresting characteristic than his precocious speculative activity. Many +a raw boy "lisps in numbers, for the numbers come;" but few discourse +Alexandrian metaphysics at the same age, for the very good reason that +the metaphysics as a rule do not "come." And even among those youth +whom curiosity, or more often vanity, induces to dabble in such +studies, one would find few indeed over whom they have cast such an +irresistible spell as to estrange them for a while from poetry +altogether. That this was the experience of Coleridge we have his own +words to show. His son and biographer, the Rev. Derwent Coleridge, has +a little antedated the poet's stages of development in stating that +when his father was sent to Christ's Hospital in his eleventh year he +was "already a poet, and yet more characteristically a metaphysician." +A poet, yes, and a precocious scholar perhaps to boot, but a +metaphysician, no; for the "delightful sketch of him by his friend and +schoolfellow Charles Lamb" was pretty evidently taken not at "this +period" of his life but some years later. Coleridge's own account of +the matter in the _Biographia Literaria_ is clear. [1] "At a very +premature age, even before my fifteenth year," he says, "I had +bewildered myself in metaphysics and in theological controversy. +Nothing else pleased me. History and particular facts lost all interest +in my mind. Poetry (though for a schoolboy of that age I was above par +in English versification, and had already produced two or three +compositions which I may venture to say were somewhat above mediocrity, +and which had gained me more credit than the sound good sense of my old +master was at all pleased with),--poetry itself, yea, novels and +romance, became insipid to me." He goes on to describe how highly +delighted he was if, during his friendless wanderings on leave-days, +"any passenger, especially if he were dressed in black," would enter +with him into a conversation, which he soon found the means of +directing to his favourite subject of "providence, foreknowledge, will, +and fate; fixed fate, freewill, foreknowledge absolute." Undoubtedly it +is to this period that one should refer Lamb's well-known description +of "Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Logician, Metaphysician, Bard." + +"How have I seen the casual passer through the cloisters stand still, +entranced with admiration (while he weighed the disproportion between +the speech and the garb of the young Mirandula), to hear thee unfold in +thy deep and sweet intonations the mysteries of Iamblichus or Plotinus +(for even in those years thou waxedst not pale at such philosophic +draughts), or reciting Homer in the Greek, or Pindar, while the walls +of the old Grey Friars re-echoed with the accents of the _inspired +charity-boy_." + +It is interesting to note such a point as that of the "deep and sweet +intonations" of the youthful voice--its most notable and impressive +characteristic in after-life. Another schoolfellow describes the young +philosopher as "tall and striking in person, with long black hair," and +as commanding "much deference" among his schoolfellows. Such was +Coleridge between his fifteenth and seventeenth year, and such +continued to be the state of his mind and the direction of his studies +until he was won back again from what he calls "a preposterous pursuit, +injurious to his natural powers and to the progress of his education," +by--it is difficult, even after the most painstaking study of its +explanations, to record the phenomenon without astonishment--a perusal +of the sonnets of William Lisle Bowles. Deferring, however, for the +present any research into the occult operation of this converting +agency, it will be enough to note Coleridge's own assurance of its +perfect efficacy. He was completely cured for the time of his +metaphysical malady, and "well were it for me perhaps," he exclaims, +"had I never relapsed into the same mental disease; if I had continued +to pluck the flowers and reap the harvest from the cultivated surface +instead of delving in the unwholesome quicksilver mines of metaphysic +depths." And he goes on to add, in a passage full of the peculiar +melancholy beauty of his prose, and full too of instruction for the +biographer, "But if, in after-time, I have sought a refuge from bodily +pain and mismanaged sensibility in abstruse researches, which exercised +the strength and subtlety of the understanding without awakening the +feelings of the heart, there was a long and blessed interval, during +which my natural faculties were allowed to expand and my original +tendencies to develop themselves--my fancy, and the love of nature, and +the sense of beauty in forms and sounds." This "long and blessed +interval" endured, as we shall see, for some eleven or twelve years. + +His own account of his seduction from the paths of poetry by the wiles +of philosophy is that physiology acted as the go-between. His brother +Luke had come up to London to walk the hospitals, and young Samuel's +insatiable intellectual curiosity immediately inspired him with a +desire to share his brother's pursuit. "Every Saturday I could make or +obtain leave, to the London Hospital trudged I. O! the bliss if I was +permitted to hold the plaisters or attend the dressings.... I became +wild to be apprenticed to a surgeon; English, Latin, yea, Greek books +of medicine read I incessantly. Blanchard's _Latin Medical +Dictionary_ I had nearly by heart. Briefly, it was a wild dream, +which, gradually blending with, gradually gave way to, a rage for +metaphysics occasioned by the essays on Liberty and Necessity in Cato's +_Letters_, and more by theology." [2] At the appointed hour, +however, Bowles the emancipator came, as has been said, to his relief, +and having opportunely fallen in love with the eldest daughter of a +widow lady of whose son he had been the patron and protector at school, +we may easily imagine that his liberation from the spell of metaphysics +was complete. "From this time," he says, "to my nineteenth year, when I +quitted school for Jesus, Cambridge, was the era of poetry and love." + +Of Coleridge's university days we know less; but the account of his +schoolfellow, Charles Le Grice, accords, so far as it goes, with what +would have been anticipated from the poet's school life. Although "very +studious," and not unambitious of academical honours--within a few +months of his entering at Jesus he won the Browne Gold Medal for a +Greek Ode on the Slave Trade [3]--his reading, his friend admits, was +"desultory and capricious. He took little exercise merely for the sake +of exercise, but he was ready at any time to unbend his mind in +conversation, and for the sake of this his room was a constant +rendezvous of conversation-loving friends. I will not call them +loungers, for they did not call to kill time but to enjoy it." From the +same record we gather that Coleridge's interest in current politics was +already keen, and that he was an eager reader, not only of Burke's +famous contributions thereto, but even a devourer of all the pamphlets +which swarmed during that agitated period from the press. The desultory +student, however, did not altogether intermit his academical studies. +In 1793 he competed for another Greek verse prize, this time +unsuccessfully. He afterwards described his ode _On Astronomy_ as +"the finest Greek poem I ever wrote;" [4] but, whatever may have been +its merits from the point of view of scholarship, the English +translation of it, made eight years after by Southey (in which form +alone it now exists), seems hardly to establish its title to the +peculiar merit claimed by its author for his earlier effort. The long +vacation of this year, spent by him in Devonshire, is also interesting +as having given birth to one of the most characteristic of the +_Juvenile Poems,_ the _Songs of the Pixies_, and the closing +months of 1793 were marked by the most singular episode in the poet's +earlier career. + +It is now perhaps impossible to ascertain whether the cause of this +strange adventure of Coleridge's was, "chagrin at his disappointment in +a love affair" or "a fit of dejection and despondency caused by some +debts not amounting to a hundred pounds;" but, actuated by some impulse +or other of restless disquietude, Coleridge suddenly quitted Cambridge +and came up, very slenderly provided with money, to London, where, +after a few days' sojourn, he was compelled by pressure of actual need +to enlist, under the name of Silas Titus Comberback (S. T. C.), [5] as a +private in the 15th Light Dragoons. It may seem strange to say so, but +it strikes one as quite conceivable that the world might have been a +gainer if fate had kept Coleridge a little longer in the ranks than the +four months of his actual service. As it was, however, his military +experiences, unlike those of Gibbon, were of no subsequent advantage to +him. He was, as he tells us, an execrable rider, a negligent groom of +his horse, and, generally, a slack and slovenly trooper; but before +drill and discipline had had time to make a smart soldier of him, he +chanced to attract the attention of his captain by having written a +Latin quotation on the white wall of the stables at Reading. This +officer, who it seems was either able to translate the ejaculation, +"Eheu! quam infortunii miserrimum est fuisse felicem," [7] or, at any +rate, to recognise the language it was written in, interested himself +forthwith on behalf of his scholarly recruit. [6] Coleridge's discharge +was obtained at Hounslow on April 10, 1794, and he returned to +Cambridge. + +The year was destined to be eventful for him in more ways than one. In +June he went to Oxford to pay a visit to an old schoolfellow, where an +accidental introduction to Robert Southey, then an undergraduate of +Balliol, laid the foundation of a friendship destined largely to +influence their future lives. In the course of the following August he +came to Bristol, where he was met by Southey, and by him introduced to +Robert Lovell, through whom and Southey he made the acquaintance of two +persons of considerable, if not exactly equal, importance to any young +author--his first publisher and his future wife. Robert Lovell already +knew Mr. Joseph Cottle, brother of Amos Cottle (Byron's "O! Amos +Cottle! Phoebus! what a name"), and himself a poet of some pretensions; +and he had married Mary Fricker, one of whose sisters, Edith, was +already engaged to Southey; while another, Sara, was afterwards to +become Mrs. Coleridge. + +As the marriage turned out on the whole an unhappy one, the present may +be a convenient moment for considering how far its future character was +determined by previously existing and unalterable conditions, and how +far it may be regarded as the result of subsequent events. De Quincey, +whose acute and in many respects most valuable monograph on the poet +touches its point of least trustworthiness in matters of this kind, +declares roundly, and on the alleged authority of Coleridge himself, +that the very primary and essential prerequisite of happiness was +wanting to the union. Coleridge, he says, assured him that his marriage +was "not his own deliberate act, but was in a manner forced upon his +sense of honour by the scrupulous Southey, who insisted that he had +gone too far in his attentions to Miss Fricker for any honourable +retreat." On the other hand, he adds, "a neutral spectator of the +parties protested to me that if ever in his life he had seen a man +under deep fascination, and what he would have called desperately in +love, Coleridge, in relation to Miss F., was that man." One need not, I +think, feel much hesitation in preferring this "neutral spectator's" +statement to that of the discontented husband, made several years after +the mutual estrangement of the couple, and with no great propriety +perhaps, to a new acquaintance. There is abundant evidence in his own +poems alone that at the time of, and for at least two or three years +subsequently to, his marriage Coleridge's feeling towards his wife was +one of profound and indeed of ardent attachment. It is of course quite +possible that the passion of so variable, impulsive, and irresolute a +temperament as his may have had its hot and cold fits, and that during +one of the latter phases Southey may have imagined that his friend +needed some such remonstrance as that referred to. But this is not +nearly enough to support the assertion that Coleridge's marriage was +"in a manner forced upon his sense of honour," and was not his own +deliberate act. It was as deliberate as any of his other acts during +the years 1794 and 1795,--that is to say, it was as wholly inspired by +the enthusiasm of the moment, and as utterly ungoverned by anything in +the nature of calculation on the possibilities of the future. He fell +in love with Sara Fricker as he fell in love with the French Revolution +and with the scheme of "Pantisocracy," and it is indeed extremely +probable that the emotions of the lover and the socialist may have +subtly acted and reacted upon each other. The Pantisocratic scheme was +essentially based at its outset upon a union of kindred souls, for it +was clearly necessary of course that each male member of the little +community to be founded on the banks of the Susquehanna should take +with him a wife. Southey and Lovell had theirs in the persons of two +sisters; they were his friends and fellow-workers in the scheme; and +they had a sympathetic sister-in-law disengaged. Fate therefore seemed +to designate her for Coleridge and with the personal attraction which +she no doubt exerted over him there may well have mingled a dash of +that mysterious passion for symmetry which prompts a man to "complete +the set." After all, too, it must be remembered that, though Mrs. +Coleridge did not permanently retain her hold upon her husband's +affections, she got considerably the better of those who shared them +with her. Coleridge found out the objections to Pantisocracy in a very +short space of time, and a decided coolness had sprung up between him +and Madame la Revolution before another two years had passed. + +The whole history indeed of this latter _liaison_ is most +remarkable, and no one, it seems to me, can hope to form an adequate +conception of Coleridge's essential instability of character without +bestowing somewhat closer attention upon this passage in his +intellectual development than it usually receives. It is not uncommon +to see the cases of Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge lumped together +indiscriminately, as interequivalent illustrations of the way in which +the young and generous minds of that era were first fascinated and then +repelled by the French Revolution. As a matter of fact, however, the +last of the three cases differed in certain very important respects +from the two former. Coleridge not only took the "frenzy-fever" in a +more violent form than either Wordsworth or Southey, and uttered wilder +things in his delirium than they, but the paroxysm was much shorter, +the _immediate_ reaction more violent in its effects and brought +about by slighter causes in his case than in theirs. This will appear +more clearly when we come to contrast the poems of 1794 and 1795 with +those of 1797. For the present it must suffice to say that while the +history of Coleridge's relations to the French Revolution is +intellectually more interesting than that of Wordsworth's and +Southey's, it plainly indicates, even in that early period of the three +lives, a mind far more at the mercy of essentially transitory sentiment +than belonged to either of the others, and far less disposed than +theirs to review the aspirations of the moment by the steady light of +the practical judgment. + +This, however, is anticipating matters. We are still in the summer of +1794, and we left Coleridge at Bristol with Southey, Lovell, and the +Miss Frickers. To this year belongs that remarkable experiment in +playwriting at high pressure, _The Fall of Robespierre_. It +originated, we learn from Southey, in "a sportive conversation at poor +Lovell's," when each of the three friends agreed to produce one act of +a tragedy, on the subject indicated in the above title, by the +following evening. Coleridge was to write the first, Southey the +second, and Lovell the third. Southey and Lovell appeared the next day +with their acts complete, Coleridge, characteristically, with only a +part of his. Lovell's, however, was found not to be in keeping with the +other two, so Southey supplied the third as well as the second, by +which time Coleridge had completed the first. The tragedy was +afterwards published entire, and is usually included in complete +editions of Coleridge's poetical works. It is an extremely immature +production, abounding in such coquettings (if nothing more serious) +with bathos as + + "Now, + Aloof thou standest from the tottering pillar, + And like a frighted child behind its mother, + Hidest thy pale face in the skirts of Mercy." + +and + + "Liberty, condensed awhile, is bursting + To scatter the arch-chemist in the explosion." + +Coleridge also contributed to Southey's _Joan of Arc_ certain +lines of which, many years afterwards, he wrote in this humorously +exaggerated but by no means wholly unjust tone of censure:--"I was +really astonished (1) at the schoolboy, wretched, allegoric machinery; +(2) at the transmogrification of the fanatic Virago into a modern +novel-pawing proselyte of the Age of Reason--a Tom Paine in +petticoats; (3) at the utter want of all rhythm in the verse, the +monotony and dead plumb-down of the pauses, and at the absence of all +bone, muscle, and sinew in the single lines." + +In September Coleridge returned to Cambridge, to keep what turned out +to be his last term at Jesus. We may fairly suppose that he had already +made up his mind to bid adieu to the Alma Mater whose bosom he was +about to quit for that of a more venerable and, as he then believed, a +gentler mother on the banks of the Susquehanna; but it is not +impossible that in any case his departure might have been expedited by +the remonstrances of college authority. Dr. Pearce, Master of Jesus, +and afterwards Dean of Ely, did all he could, records a friend of a +somewhat later date, "to keep him within bounds; but his repeated +efforts to reclaim him were to no purpose, and upon one occasion, after +a long discussion on the visionary and ruinous tendency of his later +schemes, Coleridge cut short the argument by bluntly assuring him, his +friend and master, that he mistook the matter altogether. He was +neither Jacobin, [8] he said, nor Democrat, but a Pantisocrat." And, +leaving the good doctor to digest this new and strange epithet, +Coleridge bade farewell to his college and his university, and went +forth into that world with which he was to wage so painful and variable +a struggle. + + +FOOTNOTES + +1. He tells us in the _Biographia Literaria_ that he had +translated the eight hymns of Synesius from the Greek into English +anacreontics "before his fifteenth year." It is reasonable to suppose, +therefore, that he had more scholarship in 1782 than most boys of ten +years. + +2. Footnote: Gillman, pp. 22, 23. + +3. Of this Coleridge afterwards remarked with justice that its "ideas +were better than the language or metre in which they were conveyed." +Porson, with little magnanimity, as De Quincey complains, was severe +upon its Greek, but its main conception--an appeal to Death to come, a +welcome deliverer to the slaves, and to bear them to shores where "they +may tell their beloved ones what horrors they, being men, had endured +from men"--is moving and effective. De Quincey, however, was +undoubtedly right in his opinion that Coleridge's Greek scholarship was +not of the exact order. No exact scholar could, for instance, have died +in the faith (as Coleridge did) that εστησε (S. T. C.) means "he stood," +and not "he placed." + +4. Adding "that which gained the prize was contemptible"--an +expression of opinion hardly in accordance with Le Grice's statement +("Recollections" in _Gentleman's Magazine_ for 1836) that "no one +was more convinced of the propriety of the decision than Coleridge +himself." Mr. Le Grice, however, bears valuable testimony to +Coleridge's disappointment, though I think he exaggerates its influence +in determining his career. + +5. It is characteristic of the punctilious inaccuracy of Mr. Cottle +(_Recollections_, ii. 54) that he should insist that the assumed +name was "Cumberbatch, not Comberback," though Coleridge has himself +fixed the real name by the jest, "My habits were so little equestrian, +that my horse, I doubt not, was of that opinion." This circumstance, +though trifling, does not predispose us to accept unquestioningly Mr. +Cottle's highly particularised account of Coleridge's experience with +his regiment. + +6. Miss Mitford, in her _Recollections of a Literary Life_, +interestingly records the active share taken by her father in +procuring the learned trooper's discharge. + +7. "In omni adversitate fortunæ, infelicissimum genus est infortunii +fuisse felicem."--_Boethius_. + +8. Carrlyon's _Early Years and late Reflections_, vol. i. p. 27. + + + + +CHAPTER II. + +The Bristol Lectures--Marriage--Life at Clevedon--The _Watchman_-- +Retirement to Stowey--Introduction to Wordsworth. + +[1794-1797.] + + +The reflections of the worthy Master of Jesus upon the strange reply of +the wayward young undergraduate would have been involved in even +greater perplexity if he could have looked forward a few months into +the future. For after a winter spent in London, and enlivened by those +_noctes conoque Deûm_ at the "Cat and Salutation," which Lamb has +so charmingly recorded, Coleridge returned with Southey to Bristol at +the beginning of 1795, and there proceeded to deliver a series of +lectures which, whatever their other merits, would certainly not have +assisted Dr. Pearce to grasp the distinction between a Pantisocrat and +a Jacobin. As a scholar and a man of literary taste he might possibly +have admired the rhetorical force of the following outburst, but, +considering that the "HE" here gibbeted in capitals was no less a +personage than the "heaven-born minister" himself, a plain man might +well have wondered what additional force the vocabulary of Jacobinism +could have infused into the language of Pantisocracy. After summing up +the crimes of the Reign of Terror the lecturer asks: "Who, my brethren, +was the cause of this guilt if not HE who supplied the occasion and the +motive? Heaven hath bestowed on _that man_ a portion of its +ubiquity, and given him an actual presence in the sacraments of hell, +wherever administered, in all the bread of bitterness, in all the cups +of blood." And in general, indeed, the _Conciones ad Populum_, as +Coleridge named these lectures on their subsequent publication, were +rather calculated to bewilder any of the youthful lecturer's well- +wishers who might be anxious for some means of discriminating his +attitude from that of the Hardys, the Horne Tookes, and the Thelwalls +of the day. A little warmth of language might no doubt be allowed to a +young friend of liberty in discussing legislation which, in the +retrospect, has staggered even so staunch a Tory as Sir Archibald +Alison; but Coleridge's denunciation of the Pitt and Grenville Acts, in +the lecture entitled _The Plot Discovered_, is occasionally +startling, even for that day of fierce passions, in the fierceness of +its language. It is interesting, however, to note the ever-active play +of thought and reasoning amid the very storm and stress of political +passion. Coleridge is never for long together a mere declaimer on +popular rights and ministerial tyranny, and even this indignant address +contains a passage of extremely just and thoughtful analysis of the +constituent elements of despotism. Throughout the spring and summer of +1795 Coleridge continued his lectures at Bristol, his head still +simmering--though less violently, it may be suspected, every month-- +with Pantisocracy, and certainly with all his kindred political and +religious enthusiasms unabated. + +A study of these crude but vigorous addresses reveals to us, as does +the earlier of the early poems, a mind struggling with its half-formed +and ever-changing conceptions of the world, and, as is usual at such +peculiar phases of an intellectual development, affirming its temporary +beliefs with a fervour and vehemence directly proportioned to the +recency of their birth. Commenting on the _Conciones ad Populum_ +many years afterwards, and invoking them as witnesses to his political +consistency as an author, Coleridge remarked that with the exception of +"two or three pages involving the doctrine of philosophical necessity +and Unitarianism," he saw little or nothing in these outbursts of his +youthful zeal to retract, and, with the exception of "some flame- +coloured epithets" applied to persons, as to Mr. Pitt and others, "or +rather to personifications"--for such, he says, they really were to +him--as little to regret. + +We now, however, arrive at an event, important in the life of every +man, and which influenced that of Coleridge to an extent not the less +certainly extraordinary because difficult, if not impossible, to define +with exactitude. On the 4th of October 1795 Coleridge was married at +St. Mary Redcliffe Church, Bristol, to Sarah (or as he preferred to +spell it Sara) Fricker, and withdrew for a time from the eager +intellectual life of a political lecturer to the contemplative quiet +appropriate to the honeymoon of a poet, spent in a sequestered cottage +amid beautiful scenery, and within sound of the sea. No wonder that +among such surroundings, and with such belongings, the honeymoon should +have extended from one month to three, and indeed that Coleridge should +have waited till his youthful yearnings for a life of action, and +perhaps (though that would have lent itself less gracefully to his poem +of farewell to his Clevedon cottage) his increasing sense of the +necessity of supplementing the ambrosia of love with the bread and +cheese of mortals, compelled him to re-enter the world. No wonder he +should have delayed to do so, for it is as easy to perceive in his +poems that these were days of unclouded happiness as it is melancholy +to reflect by how few others like them his life was destined to be +brightened. The _Æolian Harp_ has no more than the moderate +merits, with its full share of the characteristic faults, of his +earlier productions; but one cannot help "reading into it" the poet's +after-life of disappointment and disillusion--estrangement from the +"beloved woman" in whose affection he was then reposing; decay and +disappearance of those "flitting phantasies" with which he was then so +joyously trifling, and the bitterly ironical scholia which fate was +preparing for such lines as + + "And tranquil muse upon tranquillity." + +One cannot in fact refrain from mentally comparing the _'olian +Harp_ of 1795 with the _Dejection_ of 1803, and no one who has +thoroughly felt the spirit of both poems can make that comparison +without emotion. The former piece is not, as has been said, in a +literary sense remarkable. With the exception of the one point of +metrical style, to be touched on presently, it has almost no note of +poetic distinction save such as belongs of right to any simple record +of a mood which itself forms the highest poetry of the average man's +life; and one well knows whence came the criticism of that MS. note +inscribed by S. T. C. in a copy of the second edition of his early +poems, "This I think the most perfect poem I ever wrote. Bad may be the +best perhaps." One feels that the annotator might just as well have +written, "How perfect was the happiness which this poem recalls!" for +this is really all that Coleridge's eulogium, with its touching bias +from the hand of memory, amounts to. + +It has become time, however, to speak more generally of Coleridge's +early poems. The peaceful winter months of 1795-96 were in all +likelihood spent in arranging and revising the products of those poetic +impulses which had more or less actively stirred within him from his +seventeenth year upwards; and in April 1797 there appeared at Bristol a +volume of some fifty pieces entitled _Poems on Various Subjects, by +S. T. Coleridge, late of Jesus College Cambridge_. It was published +by his friend Cottle, who, in a mixture of the generous with the +speculative instinct, had given him thirty guineas for the copyright. +Its contents are of a miscellaneous kind, consisting partly of rhymed +irregular odes, partly of a collection of _Sonnets on Eminent +Characters_, and partly (and principally) of a blank verse poem of +several hundred lines, then, and indeed for years afterwards, regarded +by many of the poet's admirers as his masterpiece--the _Religious +Musings_. [1] + +To the second edition of these poems, which was published in the +following year, Coleridge, at all times a candid critic (to the limited +extent to which it is possible even for the finest judges to be so) of +his own works, prefixed a preface, wherein he remarks that his poems +have been "rightly charged with a profusion of double epithets and a +general turgidness," and adds that he has "pruned the double epithets +with no sparing hand," and used his best efforts to tame the swell and +glitter both of thought and diction. "The latter fault, however, had," +he continues, "so insinuated itself into my _Religious Musings_ +with such intricacy of union that sometimes I have omitted to +disentangle the weed from fear of snapping the flower." This is plain- +spoken criticism, but I do not think that any reader who is competent +to pronounce judgment on the point will be inclined to deprecate its +severity. Nay, in order to get done with fault-finding as soon as +possible, it must perhaps be added that the admitted turgidness of the +poems is often something more than a mere defect of style, and that the +verse is turgid because the feeling which it expresses is exaggerated. +The "youthful bard unknown to fame" who, in the _Songs of the +Pixies_, is made to "heave the gentle misery of a sigh," is only +doing a natural thing described in ludicrously and unnaturally stilted +terms; but the young admirer of the _Robbers_, who informs +Schiller that if he were to meet him in the evening wandering in his +loftier mood "beneath some vast old tempest-swinging wood," he would +"gaze upon him awhile in mute awe" and then "weep aloud in a wild +ecstasy," endangers the reader's gravity not so much by extravagance of +diction as by over-effusiveness of sentiment. The former of these two +offences differs from the latter by the difference between "fustian" +and "gush." And there is, in fact, more frequent exception to be taken +to the character of the thought in these poems than to that of the +style. The remarkable gift of eloquence, which seems to have belonged +to Coleridge from boyhood, tended naturally to aggravate that very +common fault of young poets whose faculty of expression has outstripped +the growth of their intellectual and emotional experiences--the fault +of wordiness. Page after page of the poems of 1796 is filled with what +one cannot, on the most favourable terms, rank higher than rhetorical +commonplace; stanza after stanza falls pleasantly upon the ear without +suggesting any image sufficiently striking to arrest the eye of the +imagination, or awakening any thought sufficiently novel to lay hold +upon the mind. The _Æolian Harp_ has been already referred to as a +pleasing poem, and reading it, as we must, in constant recollection of +the circumstances in which it was written, it unquestionably is so. But +in none of the descriptions either of external objects or of internal +feeling which are to be found in this and its companion piece, the +_Reflections on having left a Place of Retirement_, is there +anything which can fairly be said to elevate them above the level of +graceful verse. It is only in the region of the fantastic and +supernatural that Coleridge's imagination, as he was destined to show +by a far more splendid example two years afterwards, seems to acquire +true poetic distinction. It is in the _Songs of the Pixies_ that +the young man "heaves the gentle misery of a sigh," and the sympathetic +interest of the reader of today is chilled by the too frequent +intrusion of certain abstract ladies, each preceded by her capital +letter and attended by her "adjective-in-waiting;" but, after all +deductions for the conventionalisms of "white-robed Purity," "meek-eyed +Pity," "graceful Ease," etc., one cannot but feel that the _Songs of +the Pixies_ was the offspring not of a mere abundant and picturesque +vocabulary but of a true poetic fancy. It is worth far more as an +earnest of future achievement than the very unequal _Monody on the +Death of Chatterton_ (for which indeed we ought to make special +allowance, as having been commenced in the author's eighteenth year), +and certainly than anything which could be quoted from the +_Effusions_, as Coleridge, unwilling to challenge comparison with +the divine Bowles, had chosen to describe his sonnets. It must be +honestly said indeed that these are, a very few excepted, among the +least satisfactory productions of any period of his poetic career. The +Coleridgian sonnet is not only imperfect in form and in marked contrast +in the frequent bathos of its close to the steady swell and climax of +Wordsworth, but, in by far the majority of instances in this volume, it +is wanting in internal weight. The "single pebble" of thought which a +sonnet should enclose is not only not neatly wrapped up in its envelope +of words, but it is very often not heavy enough to carry itself and its +covering to the mark. When it is so, its weight, as in the sonnet to +Pitt, is too frequently only another word for an ephemeral violence of +political feeling which, whether displayed on one side or the other, +cannot be expected to reproduce its effect in the minds of +comparatively passionless posterity. Extravagances, too, abound, as +when in _Kosciusko_ Freedom is made to look as if, in a fit of +"wilfulness and sick despair," she had drained a mystic urn containing +all the tears that had ever found "fit channel on a Patriot's furrowed +cheek." The main difficulty of the metre, too--that of avoiding forced +rhymes--is rarely surmounted. Even in the three fine lines in the +_Burke_--- + + "Thee stormy Pity and the cherished lure + Of Pomp and proud precipitance of soul, + Wildered with meteor fires"-- + +we cannot help feeling that "lure" is extremely harsh, while the +weakness of the two concluding lines of the sonnet supplies a typical +example of the disappointment which these "effusions" so often prepare +for their readers. + +Enough, however, has been said of the faults of these early poems; it +remains to consider their merits, foremost among which, as might be +expected, is the wealth and splendour of their diction in these +passages, in which such display is all that is needed for the literary +ends of the moment. Over all that wide region of literature, in which +force and fervour of utterance, depth and sincerity of feeling avail, +without the nameless magic of poetry in the higher sense of the word, +to achieve the objects of the writer and to satisfy the mind of the +reader, Coleridge ranges with a free and sure footstep. It is no +disparagement to his _Religious Musings_ to say that it is to this +class of literature that it belongs. Having said this, however, it must +be added that poetry of the second order has seldom risen to higher +heights of power. The faults already admitted disfigure it here and +there. We have "moon blasted Madness when he yells at midnight;" we +read of "eye-starting wretches and rapture-trembling seraphim," and the +really striking image of Ruin, the "old hag, unconquerable, huge, +Creation's eyeless drudge," is marred by making her "nurse" an +"impatient earthquake." But there is that in Coleridge's aspirations +and apostrophes to the Deity which impresses one even more profoundly +than the mere magnificence, remarkable as it is, of their rhetorical +clothing. They are touched with so penetrating a sincerity; they are so +obviously the outpourings of an awe-struck heart. Indeed, there is +nothing more remarkable at this stage of Coleridge's poetic development +than the instant elevation which his verse assumes whenever he passes +to Divine things. At once it seems to take on a Miltonic majesty of +diction and a Miltonic stateliness of rhythm. The tender but low-lying +domestic sentiment of the _Æolian Harp_ is in a moment informed by +it with the dignity which marks that poem's close. Apart too from its +literary merits, the biographical interest of _Religious Musings_ +is very considerable. "Written," as its title declares, but in reality, +as its length would suggest and as Mr. Cottle in fact tells us, only +_completed_, "on the Christmas eve of 1794," it gives expression +to the tumultuous emotions by which Coleridge's mind was agitated at +this its period of highest political excitement. His revolutionary +enthusiasm was now at its hottest, his belief in the infant French +Republic at its fullest, his wrath against the "coalesced kings" at its +fiercest, his contempt for their religious pretence at its bitterest. +"Thee to defend," he cries, + + "Thee to defend, dear Saviour of mankind! + Thee, Lamb of God! Thee, blameless Prince of Peace! + From all sides rush the thirsty brood of war-- + Austria, and that foul Woman of the North, + The lustful murderess of her wedded lord, + And he, connatural mind! whom (in their songs, + So bards of elder time had haply feigned) + Some Fury fondled in her hate to man, + Bidding her serpent hair in tortuous fold + Lick his young face, and at his mouth imbreathe + Horrible sympathy!" + +This is vigorous poetic invective; and the effect of such outbursts is +heightened by the rapid subsidence of the passion that inspires them +and the quick advent of a calmer mood. We have hardly turned the page +ere denunciations of Catherine and Frederick William give place to +prayerful invocations of the Supreme Being, which are in their turn the +prelude of a long and beautiful contemplative passage: "In the prim'val +age, a dateless while," etc., on the pastoral origin of human society. +It is as though some sweet and solemn strain of organ music had +succeeded to the blast of war-bugles and the roll of drums. In the +_Ode to the Departing Year_, written in the last days of 1796, +with its "prophecy of curses though I pray fervently for blessings" +upon the poet's native country, the mood is more uniform in its gloom; +and it lacks something, therefore, of those peculiar qualities which +make the _Religious Musings_ one perhaps of the most pleasing of +all Coleridge's earlier productions. But it shares with the poems +shortly to be noticed what may be called the autobiographic charm. The +fresh natural emotion of a young and brilliant mind is eternally +interesting, and Coleridge's youthful Muse, with a frankness of self- +disclosure which is not the less winning because at times it provokes a +smile, confides to us even the history of her most temporary moods. It +is, for instance, at once amusing and captivating to read in the latest +edition of the poems, as a footnote to the lines-- + + "Not yet enslaved, not wholly vile, + O Albion! O my mother isle!" + +the words-- + + "O doomed to fall, enslaved and vile--1796." + +Yes; in 1796 and till the end of 1797 the poet's native country +_was_ in his opinion all these dreadful things, but, directly the +mood changes, the verse alters, and to the advantage, one cannot but +think, of the beautiful and often-quoted close of the passage-- + +"And Ocean mid his uproar wild + Speaks safety to his island child. + Hence for many a fearless age + Has social Quiet loved thy shore, + Nor ever proud invader's rage, + Or sacked thy towers or stained thy fields with gore." + +And whether we view him in his earlier or his later mood there is a +certain strange dignity of utterance, a singular confidence in his own +poetic mission, which forbids us to smile at this prophet of four-and- +twenty who could thus conclude his menacing vaticinations:-- + + "Away, my soul, away! + I, unpartaking of the evil thing, + With daily prayer and daily toil + Soliciting for food my scanty soil, + Have wailed my country with a loud lament. + Now I recentre my immortal mind + In the deep Sabbath of meek self-content, + Cleansed from the vaporous passions which bedim + God's image, sister of the Seraphim." + +If ever the consciousness of great powers and the assurance of a great +future inspired a youth with perfect and on the whole well-warranted +fearlessness of ridicule it has surely done so here. + +Poetry alone, however, formed no sufficient outlet for Coleridge's +still fresh political enthusiasm--an enthusiasm which now became too +importunate to let him rest in his quiet Clevedon cottage. Was it +right, he cries in his lines of leave-taking to his home, that he +should dream away the entrusted hours "while his unnumbered brethren +toiled and bled"? The propaganda of Liberty was to be pushed forward; +the principles of Unitarianism, to which Coleridge had become a convert +at Cambridge, were to be preached. Is it too prosaic to add that what +poor Henri Murger calls the "chasse aux piecè de cent sous" was in all +probability demanding peremptorily to be resumed? + +Anyhow it so fell out that in the spring of the year 1796 Coleridge +took his first singular plunge into the unquiet waters of journalism, +instigated thereto by "sundry philanthropists and anti-polemists," +whose names he does not record, but among whom we may conjecturally +place Mr. Thomas Poole of Stowey, with whom he had formed what was +destined to be one of the longest and closest friendships of his life. +Which of the two parties--the advisers or the advised--was responsible +for the general plan of this periodical and for the arrangements for +its publication is unknown; but one of these last-mentioned details is +enough to indicate that there could have been no "business head" among +them. Considering that the motto of the _Watchman_ declared the +object of its issue to be that "all might know the truth, and that the +truth might make them free," it is to be presumed that the promoters of +the scheme were not unwilling to secure as many subscribers as possible +for their sheet of "thirty-two pages, large octavo, closely printed, +price only fourpence." In order, however, to exempt it from the stamp- +tax, and with the much less practical object of making it "contribute +as little as possible to the supposed guilt of a war against freedom," +it was to be published on every eighth day, so that the week-day of its +appearance would of course vary with each successive week--an +arrangement as ingeniously calculated to irritate and alienate its +public as any perhaps that the wit of man could have devised. So, +however, it was to be, and accordingly with "a naming prospectus, +'Knowledge is Power,' to cry the state of the political atmosphere," +Coleridge set off on a tour to the north, from Bristol to Sheffield, +for the purpose of procuring customers, preaching Unitarian sermons by +the way in most of the great towns, "as an hireless volunteer in a blue +coat and white waistcoat that not a rag of the woman of Babylon might +be seen on me." How he sped upon his mission is related by him with +infinite humour in the _Biographia Literaria_. He opened the +campaign at Birmingham upon a Calvinist tallow-chandler, who, after +listening to half an hour's harangue, extending from "the captivity of +the nations" to "the near approach of the millennium," and winding up +with a quotation describing the latter "glorious state" out of the +_Religious Musings_, inquired what might be the cost of the new +publication. Deeply sensible of "the anti-climax, the abysmal bathos" +of the answer, Coleridge replied, "Only fourpence, each number to be +published every eighth day," upon which the tallow-chandler observed +doubtfully that that came to "a deal of money at the end of the year." +What determined him, however, to withhold his patronage was not the +price of the article but its quantity, and not the deficiency of that +quantity but its excess. Thirty-two pages, he pointed out, was more +than he ever read all the year round, and though "as great a one as any +man in Brummagem for liberty and truth, and them sort of things, he +begged to be excused." Had it been possible to arrange for supplying +him with sixteen pages of the paper for twopence, a bargain might no +doubt have been struck; but he evidently had a business-like repugnance +to anything in the nature of "over-trading." Equally unsuccessful was a +second application made at Manchester to a "stately and opulent +wholesale dealer in cottons," who thrust the prospectus into his pocket +and turned his back upon the projector, muttering that he was "overrun +with these articles." This, however, was Coleridge's last attempt at +canvassing. His friends at Birmingham persuaded him to leave that work +to others, their advice being no doubt prompted, in part at least, by +the ludicrous experience of his qualifications as a canvasser which the +following incident furnished them. The same tradesman who had +introduced him to the patriotic tallow-chandler entertained him at +dinner, and, after the meal, invited his guest to smoke a pipe with him +and "two or three other _illuminati_ of the same rank." The +invitation was at first declined on the plea of an engagement to spend +the evening with a minister and his friends, and also because, writes +Coleridge, "I had never smoked except once or twice in my lifetime, and +then it was herb-tobacco mixed with Oronooko." His host, however, +assured him that the tobacco was equally mild, and "seeing, too, that +it was of a yellow colour," he took half a pipe of it, "filling the +lower half of the bowl," for some unexplained reason, "with salt." He +was soon, however, compelled to resign it "in consequence of a +giddiness and distressful feeling" in his eyes, which, as he had drunk +but a single glass of ale, he knew must have been the effect of the +tobacco. Deeming himself recovered after a short interval, he sallied +forth to fulfil the evening's engagement; but the symptoms returned +with the walk and the fresh air, and he had scarcely entered the +minister's drawing-room and opened a packet of letters awaiting him +there than he "sank back on the sofa in a sort of swoon rather than +sleep." Fortunately he had had time to inform his new host of the +confused state of his feelings and of its occasion; for "here and thus +I lay," he continues, "my face like a wall that is whitewashing, +deathly pale, and with the cold drops of perspiration running down it +from my forehead; while one after another there dropped in the +different gentlemen who had been invited to meet and spend the evening +with me, to the number of from fifteen to twenty. As the poison of +tobacco acts but for a short time, I at length awoke from insensibility +and looked round on the party, my eyes dazzled by the candles, which +had been lighted in the interim. By way of relieving my embarrassment +one of the gentlemen began the conversation with: 'Have you seen a +paper to-day, Mr. Coleridge?' 'Sir,' I replied, rubbing my eyes, 'I am +far from convinced that a Christian is permitted to read either +newspapers or any other works of merely political and temporary +interest.'" The incongruity of this remark, with the purpose for which +the speaker was known to have visited Birmingham, and to assist him in +which the company had assembled, produced, as was natural, "an +involuntary and general burst of laughter," and the party spent, we are +told, a most delightful evening. Both then and afterwards, however, +they all joined in dissuading the young projector from proceeding with +his scheme, assuring him "in the most friendly and yet most flattering +expressions" that the employment was neither fit for him nor he for the +employment. They insisted that at any rate "he should make no more +applications in person, but carry on the canvass by proxy," a +stipulation which we may well believe to have been prompted as much by +policy as by good nature. The same hospitable reception, the same +dissuasion, and, that failing, the same kind exertions on his behalf, +he met with at Manchester, Derby, Nottingham, and every other place he +visited; and the result of his tour was that he returned with nearly a +thousand names on the subscription list of the _Watchman_, +together with "something more than a half conviction that prudence +dictated the abandonment of the scheme." Nothing but this, however, was +needed to induce him to persevere with it. To know that a given course +of conduct was the dictate of prudence was a sort of presumptive proof +to him at this period of life that the contrary was the dictate of +duty. In due time, or rather out of due time,--for the publication of +the first number was delayed beyond the day announced for it,--the +_Watchman_ appeared. Its career was brief--briefer, indeed, than +it need have been. A naturally short life was suicidally shortened. In +the second number, records Coleridge, with delightful _naïveté_, +"an essay against fast-days, with a most censurable application of a +text from Isaiah [2] for its motto, lost me near five hundred +subscribers at one blow." In the two following numbers he made enemies +of all his Jacobin and democratic patrons by playing Balaam to the +legislation of the Government, and pronouncing something almost like a +blessing on the "gagging bills"--measures he declared which, "whatever +the motive of their introduction, would produce an effect to be desired +by all true friends of freedom, as far as they should contribute to +deter men from openly declaiming on subjects the principles of which +they had never bottomed, and from pleading to the poor and ignorant +instead of pleading for them." At the same time the editor of the +_Watchman_ avowed his conviction that national education and a +concurring spread of the Gospel were the indispensable conditions of +any true political amelioration. We can hardly wonder on the whole that +by the time the seventh number was published its predecessors were +being "exposed in sundry old iron shops at a penny a piece." + +And yet, like everything which came from Coleridge's hand, this +immature and unpractical production has an interest of its own. Amid +the curious mixture of actuality and abstract disquisition of which +each number of the _Watchman_ is made up, we are arrested again +and again by some striking metaphor or some weighty sentence which +tells us that the writer is no mere wordy wielder of a facile pen. The +paper on the slave trade in the seventh number is a vigorous and, in +places, a heart-stirring appeal to the humane emotions. There are +passages in it which foreshadow Coleridge's more mature literary +manner--the manner of the great pulpit orators of the seventeenth +century--in a very interesting way. [3] But what was the use of No. IV +containing an effective article like this when No. III. had opened with +an "Historical Sketch of the Manners and Religion of the Ancient +Germans, introductory to a sketch of the Manners, Religion, and +Politics of present Germany"? This to a public who wanted to read about +Napoleon and Mr. Pitt! No. III. in all probability "choked off" a good +proportion of the commonplace readers who might have been well content +to have put up with the humanitarian rhetoric of No. IV., if only for its +connection with so unquestionable an actuality as West Indian sugar. It +was, anyhow, owing to successive alienations of this kind that on +13th May 1796 the editor of the _Watchman_ was compelled to bid +farewell to his few remaining readers in the tenth number of his +periodical, for the "short and satisfactory" reason that "the work does +not pay its expenses." "Part of my readers," continues Coleridge, +"relinquished it because it did not contain sufficient original +composition, and a still larger part because it contained too much;" +and he then proceeds with that half-humorous simplicity of his to +explain what excellent reasons there were why the first of these +classes should transfer their patronage to Flower's _Cambridge +Intelligencer_, and the second theirs to the _New Monthly +Magazine_. + +It is not, however, for the biographer or the world to regret the short +career of the _Watchman_, since its decease left Coleridge's mind +in undivided allegiance to the poetic impulse at what was destined to +be the period of its greatest power. In the meantime one result of the +episode had been to make a not unimportant addition to his friendships. +Mention has already been made of his somewhat earlier acquaintance with +Mr. Thomas Poole of Nether Stowey, a man of high intelligence and mark +in his time; and it was in the course of his northern peregrinations in +search of subscribers that he met with Charles Lloyd. This young man, +the son of an eminent Birmingham banker, was so struck with Coleridge's +genius and eloquence as to conceive an "ardent desire to domesticate +himself permanently with a man whose conversation was to him as a +revelation from heaven;" and shortly after the decease of the +_Watchman_ he obtained his parents' consent to the arrangement. + +Early, therefore, in the year 1797 Coleridge, accompanied by Charles +Lloyd, removed to Nether Stowey in Somersetshire, where he occupied a +cottage placed at his disposal by Mr. Poole. His first employment in +his new abode appears to have been the preparation of the second +edition of his poems. In the new issue nineteen pieces of the former +publication were discarded and twelve new ones added, the most +important of which was the _Ode to the Departing Year_, which had +first appeared in the _Cambridge Intelligencer_, and had been +immediately afterwards republished in a separate form as a thin quarto +pamphlet, together with some lines of no special merit "addressed to a +young man of fortune" (probably Charles Lloyd), "who abandoned himself +to an indolent and causeless melancholy." To the new edition were added +the preface already quoted from, and a prose introduction to the +sonnets. The volume also contained some poems by Charles Lloyd and an +enlarged collection of sonnets and other pieces by Charles Lamb, the +latter of whom about the time of its publication paid his first visit +to the friend with whom, ever since leaving Christ's Hospital, he had +kept up a constant and, to the student of literature, a most +interesting correspondence. [4] In June 1797 Charles and Mary Lamb +arrived at the Stowey cottage to find their host disabled by an +accident which prevented him from walking during their whole stay. It +was during their absence on a walking expedition that he composed the +pleasing lines-- + + "The lime-tree bower my prison," + +in which he thrice applies to his friend that epithet which gave such +humorous annoyance to the "gentle-hearted Charles." [5] + +But a greater than Lamb, if one may so speak without offence to the +votaries of that rare humorist and exquisite critic, had already made +his appearance on the scene. Some time before this visit of Lamb's to +Stowey Coleridge had made the acquaintance of the remarkable man who +was destined to influence his literary career in many ways importantly, +and in one way decisively. It was in the month of June 1797, and at the +village of Racedown in Dorsetshire, that he first met William +Wordsworth. + + +FOOTNOTES + +1. The volume contained also three sonnets by Charles Lamb, one of +which was destined to have a somewhat curious history. + +2. "Wherefore my bowels shall sound like an harp."--Is. xvi. 11. + +3. Take for instance this sentence: "Our own sorrows, like the Princes +of Hell in Milton's Pandemonium, sit enthroned 'bulky and vast;' while +the miseries of our fellow-creatures dwindle into pigmy forms, and are +crowded in an innumerable multitude into some dark corner of the +heart." Both in character of imagery and in form of structure we have +here the germ of such passages as this which one might confidently defy +the most accomplished literary "taster" to distinguish from Jeremy +Taylor: "Or like two rapid streams that at their first meeting within +narrow and rocky banks mutually strive to repel each other, and +intermix reluctantly and in tumult, but soon finding a wider channel +and more yielding shores, blend and dilate and flow on in one current +and with one voice."--_Biog. Lit._ p. 155. + +4. Perhaps a "correspondence" of which only one side exists may be +hardly thought to deserve that name. Lamb's letters to Coleridge are +full of valuable criticism on their respective poetical efforts. +Unfortunately in, it is somewhat strangely said, "a fit of dejection" +he destroyed all Coleridge's letters to him. + +5. Lamb's Correspondence with Coleridge, Letter XXXVII. + + + + +CHAPTER III. + +Coleridge and Wordsworth--Publication of the _Lyrical +Ballads_--The _Ancient Mariner_--The first part of +_Christabel_--Decline of Coleridge's poetic impulse- +Final review of his poetry. + +[1797-1799.] + + +The years 1797 and 1798 are generally and justly regarded as the +blossoming-time of Coleridge's poetic genius. It would be scarcely an +exaggeration to say that they were even more than this, and that within +the brief period covered by them is included not only the development +of the poet's powers to their full maturity but the untimely beginnings +of their decline. For to pass from the poems written by Coleridge +within these two years to those of later origin is like passing from +among the green wealth of summer foliage into the well-nigh naked woods +of later autumn. During 1797 and 1798 the _Ancient Mariner_, the +first part of _Christabel_, the fine ode to France, the _Fears +in Solitude_, the beautiful lines entitled _Frost at Midnight_, +the _Nightingale_, the _Circassian Love-Chant_, the piece known +as _Love_ from the poem of the _Dark Ladie_, and that strange +fragment _Kubla Khan_, were all of them written and nearly all +of them published; while between the last composed of these and +that swan-song of his dying Muse, the _Dejection_, of 1802, there +is but one piece to be added to the list of his greater works. This +therefore, the second part of _Christabel_ (1800), may almost be +described by the picturesque image in the first part of the same poem +as + + "The one red leaf, the last of its clan, + Hanging so light and hanging so high, + On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky." + +The first to fail him of his sources of inspiration was his +revolutionary enthusiasm; and the ode to France--the _Recantation_, +as it was styled on its first appearance in the _Morning Post_--is the +record of a reaction which, as has been said, was as much speedier in +Coleridge's case than in that of the other ardent young minds which had +come under the spell of the Revolution as his enthusiasm had been more +passionate than theirs. In the winter of 1797-98 the Directory had +plunged France into an unnatural conflict with her sister Republic of +Switzerland, and Coleridge, who could pardon and had pardoned her +fierce animosity against a country which he considered not so much his +own as Pitt's, was unable to forgive her this. In the _Recantation_ +he casts her off for ever; he perceives at last that true liberty is not +to be obtained through political, but only through spiritual emancipation; +that-- + + "The sensual and the dark rebel in vain, + Slaves by their own compulsion! In mad game + They burst their manacles, and wear the name + Of Freedom graven on a heavier chain"; + +and arrives in a noble peroration at the somewhat unsatisfactory +conclusion, that the spirit of liberty, "the guide of homeless winds +and playmate of the waves," is to be found only among the elements, and +not in the institutions of man. And in the same quaintly ingenuous +spirit which half touches and half amuses us in his earlier poems he +lets us perceive a few weeks later, in his _Fears in Solitude_, +that sympathy with a foreign nation threatened by the invader may +gradually develop into an almost filial regard for one's own similarly +situated land. He has been deemed, he says, an enemy of his country. + + "But, O dear Britain! O my mother Isle," + +once, it may be remembered, "doomed to fall enslaved and vile," but +now-- + + "Needs must them prove a name most dear and holy, + To me a son, a brother, and a friend, + A husband and a father! who revere + All bonds of natural love, and find them all + Within the limits of thy rocky shores." + +After all, it has occurred to him, England is not only the England of +Pitt and Grenville, and in that capacity the fitting prey of the +insulted French Republic: she is also the England of Sara Coleridge, +and little Hartley, and of Mr. Thomas Poole of Nether Stowey. And so, +to be sure, she was in 1796 when her downfall was predicted, and in the +spirit rather of the Old Testament than of the New. But there is +something very engaging in the candour with which the young poet +hastens to apprise us of this his first awakening to the fact. + +_France_ may be regarded as the last ode, and _Fears in +Solitude_ as the last blank-verse poem of any importance, that owe +their origin to Coleridge's early political sentiments. Henceforth, and +for the too brief period of his poetic activity, he was to derive his +inspiration from other sources. The most fruitful and important of +these was unquestionably his intercourse with Wordsworth, from whom, +although there was doubtless a reciprocation of influence between +them, his much more receptive nature took a far deeper impression than +it made. [1] At the time of their meeting he had already for some three +years been acquainted with Wordsworth's works as a poet, and it speaks +highly for his discrimination that he was able to discern the great +powers of his future friend, even in work so immature in many respects +as the _Descriptive Sketches_. It was during the last year of his +residence at Cambridge that he first met with these poems, of which he +says in the _Biographia Literaria_ that "seldom, if ever, was the +emergence of an original poetic genius above the literary horizon more +evidently announced;" and the effect produced by this volume was +steadily enhanced by further acquaintance both with the poet and his +works. Nothing, indeed, is so honourably noticeable and even touching +in Coleridge's relation to his friend as the tone of reverence with +which, even in the days of his highest self-confidence and even almost +haughty belief in the greatness of his own poetic mission, he was +accustomed to speak of Wordsworth. A witness, to be more fully cited +hereafter, and whose testimony is especially valuable as that of one +who was by no means blind to Coleridge's early foible of self- +complacency, has testified to this unbounded admiration of his brother- +poet. "When," records this gentleman, "we have sometimes spoken +complimentarily to Coleridge of himself he has said that he was nothing +in comparison with Wordsworth." And two years before this, at a time +when they had not yet tested each other's power in literary +collaboration, he had written to Cottle to inform him of his +introduction to the author of "near twelve hundred lines of blank +verse, superior, I dare aver, to anything in our language which in any +way resembles it," and had declared with evident sincerity that he felt +"a little man" by Wordsworth's side. + +His own impression upon his new friend was more distinctively personal +in its origin. It was by Coleridge's total individuality, by the sum of +his vast and varied intellectual powers, rather than by the specific +poetic element contained in them, that Wordsworth, like the rest of the +world indeed, was in the main attracted; but it is clear enough that +this attraction was from the first most powerful. On that point we have +not only the weighty testimony of Dorothy Wordsworth, as conveyed in +her often-quoted description [2] of her brother's new acquaintance, but +the still more conclusive evidence of her brother's own acts. He gave +the best possible proof of the fascination which had been exercised +over him by quitting Racedown with his sister for Alfoxden near Nether +Stowey within a few weeks of his first introduction to Coleridge, a +change of abode for which, as Miss Wordsworth has expressly recorded, +"our principal inducement was Coleridge's society." + +By a curious coincidence the two poets were at this time simultaneously +sickening for what may perhaps be appropriately called the "poetic +measles." They were each engaged in the composition of a five-act +tragedy, and read scenes to each other, and to each other's admiration, +from their respective dramas. Neither play was fortunate in its +immediate destiny. Wordsworth's tragedy, the _Borderers_, was +greatly commended by London critics and decisively rejected by the +management of Covent Garden. As for Coleridge, the negligent Sheridan +did not even condescend to acknowledge the receipt of his manuscript; +his play was passed from hand to hand among the Drury Lane Committee; +but not till many years afterwards did _Osorio_ find its way under +another name to the footlights. + +For the next twelvemonth the intercourse between the two poets was +close and constant, and most fruitful in results of high moment to +English literature. It was in their daily rambles among the Quantock +Hills that they excogitated that twofold theory of the essence and +functions of poetry which was to receive such notable illustration in +their joint volume of verse, the _Lyrical Ballads_; it was during +a walk over the Quantock Hills that by far the most famous poem of that +series, the _Ancient Mariner_, was conceived and in part composed. +The publication of the _Lyrical Ballads_ in the spring of the year +1798 was, indeed, an event of double significance for English poetry. +It marked an epoch in the creative life of Coleridge, and a no less +important one in the critical life of Wordsworth. In the _Biographia +Literaria_ the origination of the plan of the work is thus +described:-- + +"During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours our +conversation turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry, +the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful +adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest +of novelty by the modifying colours of the imagination. The sudden +charm which accidents of light and shade, which moonlight or sunset +diffused over a known and familiar landscape appeared to represent the +practicability of combining both. These are the poetry of nature. The +thought suggested itself (to which of us I do not recollect) that a +series of poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one the +incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural; and +the interest aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the +affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions as would naturally +accompany such situations, supposing them real.... For the second +class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life; the characters +and incidents were to be such as will be found in every village and its +vicinity where there is a meditative and feeling mind to seek after +them, or to notice them when they present themselves. In this idea +originated the plan of the _Lyrical Ballads_, in which it was +agreed that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters +supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our +inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to +procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of +disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith. Mr. +Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself, as his +object, to give the charm of novelty to things of everyday, and to +excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural by awakening the mind's +attention from the lethargy of custom and directing it to the +loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible +treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and +selfish solicitude, we have eyes which see not, ears that hear not, and +hearts which neither feel nor understand." + +We may measure the extent to which the poetic teaching and practice of +Wordsworth have influenced subsequent taste and criticism by noting how +completely the latter of these two functions of poetry has overshadowed +the former. To lend the charm of imagination to the real will appear to +many people to be not one function of poetry merely but its very +essence. To them it is poetry, and the only thing worthy of the name; +while the correlative function of lending the force of reality to the +imaginary will appear at best but a superior kind of metrical +romancing, or clever telling of fairy tales. Nor of course can there, +from the point of view of the highest conception of the poet's office, +be any comparison between the two. In so far as we regard poetry as +contributing not merely to the pleasure of the mind but to its health +and strength--in so far as we regard it in its capacity not only to +delight but to sustain, console, and tranquillise the human spirit-- +there is, of course, as much difference between the idealistic and the +realistic forms of poetry as there is between a narcotic potion and a +healing drug. The one, at best, can only enable a man to forget his +burdens; the other fortifies him to endure them. It is perhaps no more +than was naturally to be expected of our brooding and melancholy age, +that poetry (when it is not a mere voluptuous record of the subjective +impressions of sense) should have become almost limited in its very +meaning to the exposition of the imaginative or spiritual aspect of the +world of realities; but so it is now, and so in Coleridge's time it +clearly was _not_. Coleridge, in the passage above quoted, shows +no signs of regarding one of the two functions which he attributes to +poetry as any more accidental or occasional than the other; and the +fact that the realistic portion of the _Lyrical Ballads_ so far +exceeded in amount its supernatural element, he attributes not to any +inherent supremacy in the claims of the former to attention but simply +to the greater industry which Wordsworth had displayed in his special +department of the volume. For his own part, he says, "I wrote the +_Ancient Mariner_, and was preparing, among other poems, the +_Dark Ladie_ and the _Christabel_, in which I should have more +nearly realised my ideal than I had done in my first attempt. But +Mr. Wordsworth's industry had proved so much more successful, and the +number of the poems so much greater, that my compositions, instead of +forming a balance, appeared rather an interpolation of heterogeneous +matter." There was certainly a considerable disparity between the +amount of their respective contributions to the volume, which, in fact, +contained nineteen pieces by Wordsworth and only four by Coleridge. +Practically, indeed, we may reduce this four to one; for, of the three +others, the two scenes from _Osorio_ are without special distinction, +and the _Nightingale_, though a graceful poem, and containing +an admirably-studied description of the bird's note, is too +slight and short to claim any importance in the series. But the one +long poem which Coleridge contributed to the collection is alone +sufficient to associate it for ever with his name. _Unum sed +leonem._ To any one who should have taunted him with the comparative +infertility of his Muse he might well have returned the haughty answer +of the lioness in the fable, when he could point in justification of it +to the _Rime of the Ancient Marinere_. + +There is, I may assume, no need at the present day to discuss the true +place in English literature of this unique product of the human +imagination. One is bound, however, to attempt to correlate and adjust +it to the rest of the poet's work, and this, it must be admitted, is a +most difficult piece of business. Never was there a poem so irritating +to a critic of the "pigeon-holing" variety. It simply defies him; and +yet the instinct which he obeys is so excusable, because in fact so +universal, that one feels guilty of something like disloyalty to the +very principles of order in smiling at his disappointment. Complete and +symmetrical classification is so fascinating an amusement; it would +simplify so many subjects of study, if men and things would only +consent to rank themselves under different categories, and remain +there; it would, in particular, be so inexpressibly convenient to be +able to lay your hand upon your poet whenever you wanted him by merely +turning to a shelf labelled "Realistic" or "Imaginative" (nay, perhaps, +to the still greater saving of labour--Objective or Subjective), that +we cannot be surprised at the strength of the aforesaid instinct in +many a critical mind. Nor should it be hard to realise its revolt +against those single exceptions which bring its generalisations to +nought. When the pigeon-hole will admit every "document" but one, the +case is hard indeed; and it is not too much to say that the _Ancient +Mariner_ is the one document which the pigeon-hole in this instance +declines to admit. If Coleridge had only refrained from writing this +remarkable poem, or if, having done so, he had written more poems like +it, the critic might have ticketed him with a quiet mind, and gone on +his way complacent. As it is, however, the poet has contrived in virtue +of this performance not only to defeat classification but to defy it. +For the weird ballad abounds in those very qualities in which +Coleridge's poetry with all its merits is most conspicuously deficient, +while on the other hand it is wholly free from the faults with which he +is most frequently and justly chargeable. One would not have said in +the first place that the author of _Religious Musings_, still less +of the _Monody on the Death of Chatterton_, was by any means the +man to have compassed triumphantly at the very first attempt the +terseness, vigour, and _naïveté_ of the true ballad-manner. To +attain this, Coleridge, the student of his early verse must feel, would +have rather more to retrench and much more to restrain than might be +the case with many other youthful poets. The exuberance of immaturity, +the want of measure, the "not knowing where to stop," are certainly +even more conspicuous in the poems of 1796 than they are in most +productions of the same stage of poetic development; and these +qualities, it is needless to say, require very stern chastening from +him who would succeed in the style which Coleridge attempted for the +first time in the _Ancient Mariner_. + +The circumstances of this immortal ballad's birth have been related +with such fulness of detail by Wordsworth, and Coleridge's own +references to them are so completely reconcilable with that account, +that it must have required all De Quincey's consummate ingenuity as a +mischief-maker to detect any discrepancy between the two. + +In the autumn of 1797, records Wordsworth in the MS. notes which he +left behind him, "Mr. Coleridge, my sister, and myself started from +Alfoxden pretty late in the afternoon with a view to visit Linton and +the Valley of Stones near to it; and as our united funds were very +small, we agreed to defray the expense of the tour by writing a poem to +be sent to the _New Monthly Magazine_. Accordingly we set off, and +proceeded along the Quantock Hills towards Watchet; and in the course +of this walk was planned the poem of the _Ancient Mariner_, +founded on a dream, as Mr. Coleridge said, of his friend Mr. +Cruikshank. Much the greatest part of the story was Mr. Coleridge's +invention, but certain parts I suggested; for example, some crime was +to be committed which should bring upon the Old Navigator, as Coleridge +afterwards delighted to call him, the spectral persecution, as a +consequence of that crime and his own wanderings. I had been reading in +Shelvocke's _Voyages_, a day or two before, that while doubling +Cape Horn they frequently saw albatrosses in that latitude, the largest +sort of sea-fowl, some extending their wings twelve or thirteen feet. +'Suppose,' said I, 'you represent him as having killed one of these +birds on entering the South Sea, and that the tutelary spirits of these +regions take upon them to avenge the crime.' The incident was thought +fit for the purpose, and adopted accordingly. I also suggested the +navigation of the ship by the dead men, but do not recollect that I had +anything more to do with the scheme of the poem. The gloss with which +it was subsequently accompanied was not thought of by either of us at +the time, at least not a hint of it was given to me, and I have no +doubt it was a gratuitous afterthought. We began the composition +together on that to me memorable evening. I furnished two or three +lines at the beginning of the poem, in particular-- + + "'And listened like a three years' child: + The Mariner had his will.' + +"These trifling contributions, all but one, which Mr. C. has with +unnecessary scrupulosity recorded,[3] slipped out of his mind, as they +well might. As we endeavoured to proceed conjointly (I speak of the +same evening) our respective manners proved so widely different that it +would have been quite presumptuous in me to do anything but separate +from an undertaking upon which I could only have been a clog.... The +_Ancient Mariner_ grew and grew till it became too important for +our first object, which was limited to our expectation of five pounds; +and we began to think of a volume which was to consist, as Mr. +Coleridge has told the world, of poems chiefly on supernatural +subjects." Except that the volume ultimately determined on was to +consist only "partly" and not "chiefly" of poems on supernatural +subjects (in the result, as has been seen, it consisted "chiefly" of +poems upon natural subjects), there is nothing in this account which +cannot be easily reconciled with the probable facts upon which De +Quincey bases his hinted charge against Coleridge in his _Lake +Poets_. It was not Coleridge who had been reading Shelvocke's +_Voyages_, but Wordsworth, and it is quite conceivable, therefore, +that the source from which his friend had derived the idea of the +killing of the albatross may (if indeed he was informed of it at the +time) have escaped his memory twelve years afterwards, when the +conversation with De Quincey took place. Hence, in "disowning his +obligations to Shelvocke," he may not by any means have intended to +suggest that the albatross incident was his own thought. Moreover, De +Quincey himself supplies another explanation of the matter, which we +know, from the above-quoted notes of Wordsworth's, to be founded upon +fact. "It is possible," he adds, "from something which Coleridge said +on another occasion, that before meeting a fable in which to embody his +ideas he had meditated a poem on delirium, confounding its own dream- +scenery with external things, and connected with the imagery of high +latitudes." Nothing, in fact, would be more natural than that +Coleridge, whose idea of the haunted seafarer was primarily suggested +by his friend's dream, and had no doubt been greatly elaborated in his +own imagination before being communicated to Wordsworth at all, should +have been unable, after a considerable lapse of time, to distinguish +between incidents of his own imagining and those suggested to him by +others. And, in any case, the "unnecessary scrupulosity," rightly +attributed to him by Wordsworth with respect to this very poem, is +quite incompatible with any intentional denial of obligations. + +Such, then, was the singular and even prosaic origin of the _Ancient +Mariner_--a poem written to defray the expenses of a tour; surely +the most sublime of "pot-boilers" to be found in all literature. It is +difficult, from amid the astonishing combination of the elements of +power, to select that which is the most admirable; but, considering +both the character of the story and of its particular vehicle, perhaps +the greatest achievement of the poem is the simple realistic force of +its narrative. To achieve this was of course Coleridge's main object: +he had undertaken to "transfer from our inward nature a human interest +and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of +imaginations that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which +constitutes poetic faith." But it is easier to undertake this than to +perform it, and much easier to perform it in prose than in verse--with +the assistance of the everyday and the commonplace than without it. +Balzac's _Peau de Chagrin_ is no doubt a great feat of the +realistic-supernatural; but no one can help feeling how much the author +is aided by his "broker's clerk" style of description, and by the +familiar Parisian scenes among which he makes his hero move. It is +easier to compass verisimilitude in the Palais-Royal than on the South +Pacific, to say nothing of the thousand assisting touches, out of place +in rhyme and metre, which can be thrown into a prose narrative. The +_Ancient Mariner_, however, in spite of all these drawbacks, is as +real to the reader as is the hero of the _Peau de Chagrin_; we are +as convinced of the curse upon one of the doomed wretches as upon the +other; and the strange phantasmagoric haze which is thrown around the +ship and the lonely voyager leaves their outlines as clear as if we saw +them through the sunshine of the streets of Paris. Coleridge triumphs +over his difficulties by sheer vividness of imagery and terse vigour of +descriptive phrase--two qualities for which his previous poems did not +prove him to possess by any means so complete a mastery. For among all +the beauties of his earlier landscapes we can hardly reckon that of +intense and convincing truth. He seems seldom before to have written, +as Wordsworth nearly always seems to write, "with his eye on the +object;" and certainly he never before displayed any remarkable power +of completing his word-picture with a few touches. In the _Ancient +Mariner_ his eye seems never to wander from his object, and again +and again the scene starts out upon the canvas in two or three strokes +of the brush. The skeleton ship, with the dicing demons on its deck; +the setting sun peering "through its ribs, as if through a dungeon- +grate;" the water-snakes under the moonbeams, with the "elfish light" +falling off them "in hoary flakes" when they reared; the dead crew, who +work the ship and "raise their limbs like lifeless tools"--everything +seems to have been actually _seen_, and we believe it all as the +story of a truthful eye-witness. The details of the voyage, too, are +all chronicled with such order and regularity, there is such a diary- +like air about the whole thing, that we accept it almost as if it were +a series of extracts from the ship's "log." Then again the execution--a +great thing to be said of so long a poem--is marvellously equal +throughout; the story never drags or flags for a moment, its felicities +of diction are perpetual, and it is scarcely marred by a single weak +line. What could have been better said of the instantaneous descent of +the tropical night than + + "The Sun's rim dips; the stars rush out: + At one stride comes the dark;" + +what more weirdly imagined of the "cracks and growls" of the rending +iceberg than that they sounded "like noises in a swound"? And how +beautifully steals in the passage that follows upon the cessation of +the spirit's song-- + + "It ceased; yet still the sails made on + A pleasant noise till noon, + A noise like to a hidden brook + In the leafy month of June, + That to the sleeping woods all night + Singeth a quiet tune." + +Then, as the ballad draws to its close, after the ship has +drifted over the harbour-bar-- + + "And I with sobs did pray-- + O let me be awake, my God; + Or let me sleep alway," + +with what consummate art are we left to imagine the physical traces +which the mariner's long agony had left behind it by a method far more +terrible than any direct description--the effect, namely, which the +sight of him produces upon others-- + + "I moved my lips--the Pilot shrieked + And fell down in a fit; + The holy Hermit raised his eyes, + And prayed where he did sit. + + "I took the oars: the Pilot's boy, + _Who now doth crazy go_, + Laughed loud and long, and all the while + His eyes went to and fro. + 'Ha! ha!' quoth he, 'full plain I see, + The Devil knows how to row.'" + +Perfect consistency of plan, in short, and complete equality of +execution, brevity, self-restraint, and an unerring sense of artistic +propriety--these are the chief notes of the _Ancient Mariner_, as +they are _not_, in my humble judgment, the chief notes of any poem +of Coleridge's before or since. And hence it is that this masterpiece +of ballad minstrelsy is, as has been said, so confounding to the +"pigeon-holing" mind. + +The next most famous poem of this or indeed of any period of Coleridge's +life is the fragment of _Christabel_, which, however, in spite of +the poet's own opinion on that point, it is difficult to regard as "a +more effective realisation" of the "natural-supernatural" idea. Beautiful +as it is, it possesses none of that human interest with which, according +to this idea, the narrator of the poetic story must undertake to invest +it. Nor can the unfinished condition in which it was left be fairly held +to account for this, for the characters themselves--the lady Christabel, +the witch Geraldine, and even the baron Sir Leoline himself--are somewhat +shadowy creations, with too little hold upon life and reality, and too +much resemblance to the flitting figures of a dream. Powerful in their +way as are the lines descriptive of the spell thrown over Christabel by +her uncanny guest--lines at the recitation of which Shelley is said to +have fainted--we cannot say that they strike a reader with such a sense of +horror as should be excited by the contemplation of a real flesh-and-blood +maiden subdued by "the shrunken serpent eyes" of a sorceress, and +constrained "passively to imitate" their "look of dull and treacherous +hate." Judging it, however, by any other standard than that of the poet's +own erecting, one must certainly admit the claim of _Christabel_ to +rank very high as a work of pure creative art. It is so thoroughly +suffused and permeated with the glow of mystical romance, the whole +atmosphere of the poem is so exquisitely appropriate to the subject, +and so marvellously preserved throughout, that our lack of belief in +the reality of the scenes presented to us detracts but little from the +pleasure afforded by the artistic excellence of its presentment. It +abounds, too, in isolated pictures of surpassing vividness and grace-- +word-pictures which live in the "memory of the eye" with all the +wholeness and tenacity of an actual painting. Geraldine appearing to +Christabel beneath the oak, and the two women stepping lightly across +the hall "that echoes still, pass as lightly as you will," are pictures +of this kind; and nowhere out of Keats's _Eve of St. Agnes_ is +there any "interior" to match that of Christabel's chamber, done as it +is in little more than half a dozen lines. These beauties, it is true, +are fragmentary, like the poem itself, but there is no reason to +believe that the poem itself would have gained anything in its +entirety--that is to say, as a poetic narrative--by completion. Its +main idea--that the purity of a pure maiden is a charm more powerful +for the protection of those dear to her than the spells of the evil one +for their destruction--had been already sufficiently indicated, and the +mode in which Coleridge, it seems, intended to have worked would hardly +have added anything to its effect. [4] And although he clung till very +late in life to the belief that he _could_ have finished it in +after days with no change of poetic manner--"If easy in my mind," he +says in a letter to be quoted hereafter, "I have no doubt either of the +reawakening power or of the kindling inclination"--there are few +students of his later poems who will share his confidence. Charles Lamb +strongly recommended him to leave it unfinished, and Hartley Coleridge, +in every respect as competent a judge on that point as could well be +found, always declared his conviction that his father could not, at +least _qualis ab incepto_, have finished the poem. + +The much-admired little piece first published in the _Lyrical Ballads_ +under the title of _Love_, and probably best known by its +(original) first and most pregnant stanza, [5] possesses a twofold +interest for the student of Coleridge's life and works, as illustrating +at once one of the most marked characteristics of his peculiar +temperament, and one of the most distinctive features of his poetic +manner. The lines are remarkable for a certain strange fascination of +melody--a quality for which Coleridge, who was not unreasonably proud +of his musical gift, is said to have especially prized them; and they +are noteworthy also as perhaps the fullest expression of the almost +womanly softness of Coleridge's nature. To describe their tone as +effeminate would be unfair and untrue, for effeminacy in the work of a +male hand would necessarily imply something of falsity of sentiment, +and from this they are entirely free. But it must certainly be admitted +that for a man's description of his wooing the warmth of feeling which +pervades them is as nearly sexless in character as it is possible to +conceive; and, beautiful as the verses are, one cannot but feel that +they only escape the "namby-pamby" by the breadth of a hair. + +As to the wild dream-poem _Kubla Khan_, it is hardly more than a +psychological curiosity, and only that perhaps in respect of the +completeness of its metrical form. For amid its picturesque but vague +imagery there is nothing which might not have presented itself, and the +like of which has not perhaps actually presented itself, to many a +half-awakened brain of far lower imaginative energy during its hours of +full daylight consciousness than that of Coleridge. Nor possibly is it +quite an unknown experience to many of us to have even a fully-written +record, so to speak, of such impressions imprinted instantaneously on +the mind, the conscious composition of whole pages of narrative, +descriptive, or cogitative matter being compressed as it were into a +moment of time. Unfortunately, however, the impression made upon the +ordinary brain is effaced as instantaneously as it is produced; the +abnormal exaltation of the creative and apprehensive power is quite +momentary, being probably indeed confined to the single moment between +sleep and waking; and the mental tablet which a second before was +covered so thickly with the transcripts of ideas and images, all far +more vivid, or imagined to be so, than those of waking life, and all +apprehended with a miraculous simultaneity by the mind, is converted +into a _tabula rasa_ in the twinkling of a half-opened eye. The wonder in +Coleridge's case was that his brain retained the word-impressions +sufficiently long to enable him to commit them, to the extent at least +of some fifty odd lines, to paper, and that, according to his own +belief, this is but a mere fraction of what but for an unlucky +interruption in the work of transcribing he would have been able to +preserve. His own account of this curious incident is as follows:-- + +"In the summer of 1797 the author, then in ill health, had retired to a +lonely farmhouse between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of +Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an +anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep +in his chair at the moment that he was reading, the following sentence, +or words of the same substance, in Purchas's _Pilgrimage_:--'Here +the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden +thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were enclosed by a +wall.' The Author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, +at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most +vivid confidence that he could not have composed less than from two to +three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which +all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production +of the corresponding expressions, without any sensation or +consciousness of effect. On awaking he appeared to himself to have a +distinct recollection of the whole, and, taking his pen, ink, and +paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here +preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person +on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his +return to his room found, to his no small surprise and mortification, +that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the +general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or +ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the +images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, +but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter." + +This poem, though written in 1797, remained, like _Christabel_, in +MS. till 1816. These were then published in a thin quarto volume, together +with another piece called the _Pains of Sleep_, a composition of many +years' later date than the other two, and of which there will be +occasion to say a word or two hereafter. + +At no time, however, not even in this the high-tide of its activity, +was the purely poetic impulse dominant for long together in +Coleridge's mind. He was born with the instincts of the orator, and +still more with those of the teacher, and I doubt whether he ever +really regarded himself as fulfilling the true mission of his life +except at those moments when he was seeking by spoken word to exercise +direct influence over his fellow-men. At the same time, however, such +was the restlessness of his intellect, and such his instability of +purpose, that he could no more remain constant to what he deemed his +true vocation than he could to any other. This was now to be signally +illustrated. Soon after the _Ancient Mariner_ was written, and +some time before the volume which was to contain it appeared, Coleridge +quitted Stowey for Shrewsbury to undertake the duties of a Unitarian +preacher in that town. This was in the month of January 1798, [6] and +it seems pretty certain, though exact dates are not to be ascertained, +that he was back again at Stowey early in the month of February. In the +pages of the _Liberal_ (1822) William Hazlitt has given a most +graphic and picturesque description of Coleridge's appearance and +performance in his Shrewsbury pulpit; and, judging from this, one can +well believe, what indeed was to have been antecedently expected, that +had he chosen to remain faithful to his new employment he might have +rivalled the reputation of the greatest preacher of the time. But his +friends the Wedgwoods, the two sons of the great potter, whose +acquaintance he had made a few years earlier, were apparently much +dismayed at the prospect of his deserting the library for the chapel, +and they offered him an annuity of £150 a year on condition of his +retiring from the ministry and devoting himself entirely to the study +of poetry and philosophy. Coleridge was staying at the house of +Hazlitt's father when the letter containing this liberal offer reached +him, "and he seemed," says the younger Hazlitt, "to make up his mind to +close with the proposal in the act of tying on one of his shoes." +Another inducement to so speedy an acceptance of it is no doubt to be +found in the fact of its presenting to Coleridge an opportunity for the +fulfilment of a cherished desire--that, namely, of "completing his +education," as he regarded it, by studying the German language, and +acquiring an acquaintance with the theology and philosophy of Germany +in that country itself. This prospect he was enabled, through the +generosity of the Wedgwoods, to put into execution towards the end of +1798. But before passing on from this culminating and, to all intents +and purposes, this closing year of Coleridge's career as a poet it will +be proper to attempt something like a final review of his poetic work. +Admirable as much of that work is, and unique in quality as it is +throughout, I must confess that it leaves on my own mind a stronger +impression of the unequal and imperfect than does that of any poet at +all approaching Coleridge in imaginative vigour and intellectual grasp. +It is not a mere inequality and imperfection of style like that which +so seriously detracts from the pleasure of reading Byron. Nor is it +that the thought is often _impar sibi_--that, like Wordsworth's, +it is too apt to descend from the mountain-tops of poetry to the flats +of commonplace, if not into the bogs of bathos. In both these respects +Coleridge may and does occasionally offend, but his workmanship is, on +the whole, as much more artistic than Byron's as the material of his +poetry is of more uniformly equal value than Wordsworth's. Yet, with +almost the sole exception of the _Ancient Mariner_, his work is in +a certain sense more disappointing than that of either. In spite of his +theory as to the twofold function of poetry we must finally judge that +of Coleridge, as of any other poet, by its relation to the actual. +Ancient Mariners and Christabels--the people, the scenery, and the +incidents of an imaginary world--may be handled by poetry once and +again to the wonder and delight of man; but feats of this kind cannot-- +or cannot in the Western world, at any rate--be repeated indefinitely, +and the ultimate test of poetry, at least for the modern European +reader, is its treatment of actualities--its relations to the world of +human action, passion, sensation, thought. And when we try Coleridge's +poetry in any one of these four regions of life, we seem forced to +admit that, despite all its power and beauty, it at no moment succeeds +in convincing us, as at their best moments Wordsworth's and even +Byron's continually does, that the poet has found his true poetic +vocation--that he is interpreting that aspect of life which he can +interpret better than he can any other, and which no other poet, save +the one who has vanquished all poets in their own special fields of +achievement, can interpret as well as he. In no poem of actuality does +Coleridge so victoriously show himself to be the right man at the right +work as does Wordsworth in certain moods of seership and Byron in +certain moments of passion. Of them at such moods and moments we feel +assured that they have discovered where their real strength lies, and +have put it forth to the utmost. But we never feel satisfied that +Coleridge has discovered where _his_ real strength lies, and he +strikes us as feeling no more certainty on the point himself. Strong as +is his pinion, his flight seems to resemble rather that of the eaglet +than of the full-grown eagle even to the last. He continues "mewing his +mighty youth" a little too long. There is a tentativeness of manner +which seems to come from a conscious aptitude for many poetic styles +and an incapacity to determine which should be definitively adopted and +cultivated to perfection. Hence one too often returns from any +prolonged ramble through Coleridge's poetry with an unsatisfied feeling +which does not trouble us on our return from the best literary country +of Byron or Wordsworth. Byron has taken us by rough roads, and +Wordsworth led us through some desperately flat and dreary lowlands to +his favourite "bits;" but we feel that we have seen mountain and +valley, wood and river, glen and waterfall at their best. But +Coleridge's poetry leaves too much of the feeling of a walk through a +fine country on a misty day. We may have had many a peep of beautiful +scenery and occasional glimpses of the sublime; but the medium of +vision has been of variable quality, and somehow we come home with an +uneasy suspicion that we have not seen as much as we might. It is +obvious, however, even upon a cursory consideration of the matter, that +this disappointing element in Coleridge's poetry is a necessary result +of the circumstances of its production; for the period of his +productive activity (at least after attaining manhood) was too short to +enable a mind with so many intellectual distractions to ascertain its +true poetic bent, and to concentrate its energies thereupon. If he +seems always to be feeling his way towards the work which he could do +best, it is for the very good reason that this is what, from 1796 to +1800, he was continually doing as a matter of fact. The various styles +which he attempted--and for a season, in each case, with such brilliant +results--are forms of poetic expression corresponding, on the face of +them, to poetic impulses of an essentially fleeting nature. The +political or politico-religious odes were the offspring of youthful +democratic enthusiasm; the supernatural poems, so to call them for want +of a better name, had their origin in an almost equally youthful and +more than equally transitory passion for the wild and wondrous. +Political disillusion is fatal to the one impulse, and mere advance in +years extinguishes the other. Visions of Ancient Mariners and +Christabels do not revisit the mature man, and the Toryism of middle +life will hardly inspire odes to anything. + +With the extinction of these two forms of creative impulse Coleridge's +poetic activity, from causes to be considered hereafter, came almost +entirely to an end, and into what later forms it might subsequently +have developed remains therefore a matter more or less of conjecture. +Yet I think there is almost a sufficiency of _à priori_ evidence +as to what that form would have been. Had the poet in him survived +until years had "brought the philosophic mind," he would doubtless have +done for the human spirit, in its purely isolated self-communings, what +Wordsworth did for it in its communion with external nature. All that +the poetry of Wordsworth is for the mind which loves to hold converse +with the world of things; this, and more perhaps than this--if more be +possible--would the poetry of Coleridge have been for the mind which +abides by preference in the world of self-originating emotion and +introspective thought. Wordsworth's primary function is to interpret +nature to man: the interpretation of man to himself is with him a +secondary process only-the response, in almost every instance, to +impressions from without. This poet can nobly brace the human heart to +fortitude; but he must first have seen the leech-gatherer on the lonely +moor. The "presence and the spirit interfused" throughout creation is +revealed to us in moving and majestic words; yet the poet requires to +have felt it "in the light of setting suns and the round ocean and the +living air" before he feels it "in the mind of man." But what +Wordsworth grants only to the reader who wanders with him in +imagination by lake and mountain, the Muse of Coleridge, had she lived, +would have bestowed upon the man who has entered into his inner chamber +and shut to the door. This, it seems to me, is the work for which +genius, temperament, and intellectual habit would alike have fitted +him. For while his feeling for internal nature was undoubtedly less +profound, less mystically penetrating than Wordsworth's, his +sensibilities in general were incomparably quicker and more subtle than +those of the friend in whom he so generously recognised a master; and +the reach of his sympathies extends to forms of human emotion, to +subjects of human interest which lay altogether outside the somewhat +narrow range of Wordsworth's. + +And, with so magnificent a furniture of those mental and moral +qualities which should belong to "a singer of man to men," it must not +be forgotten that his technical equipment for the work was of the most +splendidly effective kind. If a critic like Mr. Swinburne seems to +speak in exaggerated praise of Coleridge's lyrics, we can well +understand their enchantment for a master of music like himself. +Probably it was the same feeling which made Shelley describe +_France_ as "the finest ode in the English language." With all, in +fact, who hold--as it is surely plausible to hold--that the first duty +of a singer is to sing, the poetry of Coleridge will always be more +likely to be classed above than below its merits, great as they are. +For, if we except some occasional lapses in his sonnets--a metrical +form in which, at his best, he is quite "out of the running" with +Wordsworth--his melody never fails him. He is a singer always, as +Wordsworth is not always, and Byron almost never. The _'olian +Harp_ to which he so loved to listen does not more surely respond in +music to the breeze of heaven than does Coleridge's poetic utterance to +the wind of his inspiration. Of the dreamy fascination which Love +exercises over a listening ear I have already spoken; and there is +hardly less charm in the measure and assonances of the _Circassian +Love Chant. Christabel_ again, considered solely from the metrical +point of view, is a veritable _tour de force_--the very model of a +metre for romantic legend: as which, indeed, it was imitated with +sufficient grace and spirit, but seldom with anything approaching to +Coleridge's melody, by Sir Walter Scott. + +Endowed therefore with so glorious a gift of song, and only not fully +master of his poetic means because of the very versatility of his +artistic power and the very variety and catholicity of his youthful +sympathies, it is unhappily but too certain that the world has lost +much by that perversity of conspiring accidents which so untimely +silenced Coleridge's muse. And the loss is the more trying to posterity +because he seems, to a not, I think, too curiously considering +criticism, to have once actually struck that very chord which would +have sounded the most movingly beneath his touch,--and to have struck +it at the very moment when the failing hand was about to quit the keys +for ever. + + "Ostendunt terris hunc tantum fata neque ultra + Esse sinunt." + +I cannot regard it as merely fantastic to believe that the +_Dejection_, that dirge of infinite pathos over the grave of +creative imagination, might, but for the fatal decree which had by that +time gone forth against Coleridge's health and happiness, have been but +the cradle-cry of a new-born poetic power, in which imagination, not +annihilated but transmigrant, would have splendidly proved its vitality +through other forms of song. + + +FOOTNOTES + +1. Perhaps the deepest impress of the Wordsworthian influence is to be +found in the little poem _Frost at Midnight_, with its affecting +apostrophe to the sleeping infant at his side--infant destined to +develop as wayward a genius and to lead as restless and irresolute a +life as his father. Its closing lines-- + + "Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee + Whether the summer clothe the general earth + With greenness... + ... whether the eave-drops fall, + Heard only in the trances of the blast, + Or if the secret ministry of frost + Shall hang them up in silent icicles + Quietly shining to the quiet moon"-- + +might have flowed straight from the pen of Wordsworth himself. + +2. "You had a great loss in not seeing Coleridge. He is a wonderful +man. His conversation teems with soul, mind, and spirit. Then he is so +benevolent, so good tempered and cheerful, and, like William, interests +himself so much about every little trifle. At first I thought him very +plain, that is, for about three minutes; he is pale, thin, has a wide +mouth, thick lips, and not very good teeth, longish loose-growing half- +curling rough black hair. But if you hear him speak for five minutes +you think no more of them. His eye is large and full, and not very dark +but gray, such an eye as would receive from a heavy soul the dullest +expression; but it speaks every emotion of his animated mind: it has +more of the poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling than I ever witnessed. +He has fine dark eyebrows and an overhanging forehead." + +3. The lines-- + + "And it is long, and lank, and brown, + As is the ribbed sea-sand." + +4. Mr. Gillman (in his _Life_, p. 301) gives the following +somewhat bald outline of what were to form the two concluding cantos, +no doubt on the authority of Coleridge himself. The second canto ends, +it may be remembered, with the despatch of Bracy the bard to the castle +of Sir Roland:--"Over the mountains the Bard, as directed by Sir +Leoline, hastes with his disciple; but, in consequence of one of those +inundations supposed to be common to the country, the spot only where +the castle once stood is discovered, the edifice itself being washed +away. He determines to return. Geraldine, being acquainted with all +that is passing, like the weird sisters in _Macbeth_, vanishes. +Reappearing, however, she awaits the return of the Bard, exciting in +the meantime by her wily arts all the anger she could rouse in the +Baron's breast, as well as that jealousy of which he is described to +have been susceptible. The old bard and the youth at length arrive, and +therefore she can no longer personate the character of Geraldine, the +daughter of Lord Roland de Vaux, but changes her appearance to that of +the accepted though absent lover of Christabel. Next ensues a courtship +most distressing to Christabel, who feels--she knows not why--great +disgust for her once favoured knight. This coldness is very painful to +the Baron, who has no more conception than herself of the supernatural +transformation. She at last yields to her father's entreaties, and +consents to approach the altar with the hated suitor. The real lover +returning, enters at this moment, and produces the ring which she had +once given him in sign of her betrothment. Thus defeated, the +supernatural being Geraldine disappears. As predicted, the castle-bell +tolls, the mother's voice is heard, and, to the exceeding great joy of +the parties, the rightful marriage takes place, after which follows a +reconciliation and explanation between father and daughter." +5. + + "All thoughts, all passions, all delights, + Whatever stirs this mortal frame, + All are but ministers of Love, + And feed his sacred flame." + +6. It may be suggested that this sudden resolution was forced upon +Coleridge by the _res angusta domi_. But I do not think that was +the case. In the winter of 1797 he had obtained an introduction to and +entered into a literary engagement with Mr. Stuart of the _Morning +Post_, and could thus have met, as in fact he afterwards did meet, +the necessities of the hour. + + + + +CHAPTER IV. + +Visit to Germany--Life at Göttingen,--Return--Explores the Lake Country +--London--The _Morning Post_--Coleridge as a journalist--Retirement +to Keswick. + +[1799-1800.] + + +The departure of the two poets for the Continent was delayed only till +they had seen their joint volume through the press. The _Lyrical +Ballads_ appeared in the autumn of 1798, and on 16th September of +that year Coleridge left Yarmouth for Hamburg with Wordsworth and his +sister. [1] The purpose of his two companions' tour is not known to +have been other than the pleasure, or mixed pleasure and instruction, +usually derivable from foreign travel; that of Coleridge was strictly, +even sternly, educational. Immediately on his arrival in Germany he +parted from the Wordsworths, who went on to Gozlar, [2] and took up his +abode at the house of the pastor at Ratzeburg, with whom he spent five +months in assiduous study of the language. In January he removed to +Göttingen. Of his life here during the next few months we possess an +interesting record in the _Early Years and Late Reflections_ of +Dr. Carrlyon, a book published many years after the events which it +relates, but which is quite obviously a true reflection of impressions +yet fresh in the mind of its writer when its materials were first +collected. Its principal value, in fact, is that it gives us Coleridge +from the standpoint of the average young educated Englishman of the +day, sufficiently intelligent, indeed, to be sensible of his fellow- +student's transcendent abilities, but as little awed by them out of +youth's healthy irreverence of criticism as the ordinary English +undergraduate ever has been by the intellectual supremacy of any +"greatest man of his day" who might chance to have been his +contemporary at Oxford or Cambridge. In Dr. Carrlyon's reminiscences +and in the quoted letters of a certain young Parry, another of the +English student colony at Göttingen, we get a piquant picture of the +poet-philosopher of seven-and-twenty, with his yet buoyant belief in +his future, his still unquenched interest in the world of things, and +his never-to-be-quenched interest in the world of thought, his even +then inexhaustible flow of disquisition, his generous admiration for +the gifts of others, and his _naïve_ complacency--including, it +would seem, a touch of the vanity of personal appearance--in his own. +"He frequently," writes Dr. Carrlyon, "recited his own poetry, and not +unfrequently led us further into the labyrinth of his metaphysical +elucidations, either of particular passages or of the original +conception of any of his productions, than we were able to follow him. +At the conclusion, for instance, of the first stanza of +_Christabel_, he would perhaps comment at full length upon such a +line as 'Tu--whit!--Tu--whoo!' that we might not fall into the mistake +of supposing originality to be its sole merit." The example is not very +happily chosen, for Coleridge could hardly have claimed "originality" +for an onomatopoeia which occurs in one of Shakspeare's best known +lyrics; but it serves well enough to illustrate the fact that he "very +seldom went right to the end of any piece of poetry; to pause and +analyse was his delight." His disappointment with regard to his tragedy +of _Osorio_ was, we also learn, still fresh. He seldom, we are +told, "recited any of the beautiful passages with which it abounds +without a visible interruption of the perfect composure of his mind." +He mentioned with great emotion Sheridan's inexcusable treatment of him +with respect to it. At the same time, adds his friend, "he is a severe +critic of his own productions, and declares" (this no doubt with +reference to his then, and indeed his constant estimate of +_Christabel_ as his masterpiece) "that his best poems have perhaps +not appeared in print." + +Young Parry's account of his fellow-student is also fresh and pleasing. +"It is very delightful," he tells a correspondent, "to hear him sometimes +discourse on religious topics for an hour together. His fervour is +particularly agreeable when compared with the chilling speculations of +German philosophers," whom Coleridge, he adds, "successively forced to +abandon all their strongholds." He is "much liked, notwithstanding many +peculiarities. He is very liberal towards all doctrines and opinions, +and cannot be put out of temper. These circumstances give him the +advantage of his opponents, who are always bigoted and often irascible. +Coleridge is an enthusiast on many subjects, and must therefore appear +to many to possess faults, and no doubt he has faults, but he has a +good heart and a large mass of information with," as his fellow-student +condescendingly admits, "superior talents. The great fault which his +friends may lament is the variety of subjects which he adopts, and the +abstruse nature of his ordinary speculations, _extra homines podtas_. +They can easily," concludes the writer, rising here to the full +stateliness of youth's epistolary style, "they can easily excuse his +devoted attachment to his country, and his reasoning as to the means of +producing the greatest human happiness, but they do not universally +approve the mysticism of his metaphysics and the remoteness of his +topics from human comprehension." + +In the month of May 1799 Coleridge set out with a party of his fellow- +students on a walking tour through the Harz Mountains, an excursion +productive of much oral philosophising on his part, and of the +composition of the _Lines on ascending the Brocken_, not one of the +happiest efforts of his muse. As to the philosophising, "he never," says +one of his companions on this trip, "appeared to tire of mental exercise; +talk seemed to him a perennial pastime, and his endeavours to inform and +amuse us ended only with the cravings of hunger or the fatigue of a long +march, from which neither his conversational powers nor his stoicism +could protect himself or us." It speaks highly for the matter of +Coleridge's allocutions that such incessant outpourings during a +mountaineering tramp appear to have left no lasting impression of +boredom behind them. The holiday seems to have been thoroughly enjoyed +by the whole party, and Coleridge, at any rate, had certainly earned +it. For once, and it is almost to be feared for the last time in his +life, he had resisted his besetting tendency to dispersiveness, and +constrained his intelligence to apply itself to one thing at a time. +He had come to Germany to acquire the language, and to learn what of +German theology and metaphysics he might find worth the study, and his +five months' steady pursuit of the former object had been followed by +another four months of resolute prosecution of the latter. He attended +the lectures of Professor Blumenbach, and obtained through a fellow- +student notes from those of Eichhorn. He suffered no interruption in +his studies, unless we are to except a short visit from Wordsworth +and his sister, who had spent most of their stay abroad in residence +at Gozlar; and he appears, in short, to have made in every way the best +use of his time. On 24th June 1799 he gave his leave-taking supper at +Göttingen, replying to the toast of his health in fluent German but +with an execrable accent; and the next day presumably he started on his +homeward journey. + +His movements for the next few months are incorrectly stated in most of +the brief memoirs prefixed to the various editions of the poet's works, +--their writers having, it is to be imagined, accepted without +examination a misplaced date of Mr. Gillman's. It is not the fact that +Coleridge "returned to England after an absence of fourteen months, and +arrived in London the 27th of November." His absence could not have +lasted longer than a year, for we know from the evidence of Miss +Wordsworth's diary that he was exploring the Lake country (very likely +for the first time) in company with her brother and herself in the month +of September 1799. The probability is that he arrived in England early +in July, and immediately thereupon did the most natural and proper thing +to be done under the circumstances--namely, returned to his wife and +children at Nether Stowey, and remained there for the next two months, +after which he set off with the Wordsworths, then still at Alfoxden, to +visit the district to which the latter had either already resolved upon, +or were then contemplating, the transfer of their abode. The 27th of +November is no doubt the correct date of his arrival in London, though not +"from abroad." And his first six weeks in the metropolis were spent in a +very characteristic fashion--in the preparation, namely, of a work which +he pronounced with perfect accuracy to be destined to fall dead from the +press. He shut himself up in a lodging in Buckingham Street, Strand, +and by the end of the above-mentioned period he had completed his +admirable translation of _Wallenstein_, in itself a perfect, and +indeed his most perfect dramatic poem. The manuscript of this English +version of Schiller's drama was purchased by Messrs. Longman under the +condition that the translation and the original should appear at the +same time. Very few copies were sold, and the publishers, indifferent +to Coleridge's advice to retain the unsold copies until the book should +become fashionable, disposed of them as waste paper. Sixteen years +afterwards, on the publication of _Christabel_, they were eagerly +sought for, and the few remaining copies doubled their price. It was +while engaged upon this work that he formed that connection with +political jouralism which lasted, though with intermissions, throughout +most of the remainder of his life. His early poetical pieces had, as we +have seen, made their first appearance in the _Morning Post_, but +hitherto that newspaper had received no prose contribution from his +pen. His engagement with its proprietor, Mr. Daniel Stuart, to whom he +had been introduced during a visit to London in 1797, was to contribute +an occasional copy of verses for a stipulated annual sum; and some +dozen or so of his poems (notably among them the ode to _France_ +and the two strange pieces _Fire Famine and Slaughter_ and _The +Devil's Thoughts_) had entered the world in this way during the +years 1798 and 1799. + +Misled by the error above corrected, the writers of some of the brief +memoirs of Coleridge's life represent him as having sent verse +contributions to the _Morning Post_ from Germany in 1799; but as +the earliest of these only appeared in August of that year there is no +reason to suppose that any of them were written before his return to +England. The longest of the serious pieces is the well-known _Ode to +Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire_, which cannot be regarded as one +of the happiest of Coleridge's productions. Its motive is certainly a +little slight, and its sentiment more than a little overstrained. The +noble enthusiasm of the noble lady who, "though nursed in pomp and +pleasure," could yet condescend to "hail the platform wild where once +the Austrian fell beneath the shaft of Tell," hardly strikes a reader +of the present day as remarkable enough to be worth "gushing" over; and +when the poet goes on to suggest as the explanation of Georgiana's +having "learned that heroic measure" that the Whig great lady had +suckled her own children, we certainly seem to have taken the fatal +step beyond the sublime! It is to be presumed that Tory great ladies +invariably employed the services of a wet-nurse, and hence failed to +win the same tribute from the angel of the earth, who, usually, while +he guides + + "His chariot-planet round the goal of day, + All trembling gazes on the eye of God," + +but who on this occasion "a moment turned his awful face away" to gaze +approvingly on the high-born mother who had so conscientiously +performed her maternal duties. + +Very different is the tone of this poem from that of the two best known +of Coleridge's lighter contributions to the _Morning Post_. The +most successful of these, however, from the journalistic point of view, +is in a literary sense the less remarkable. One is indeed a little +astonished to find that a public, accustomed to such admirable political +satire as the _Anti-Jacobin_, should have been so much taken as it +seems to have been by the rough versification and somewhat clumsy sarcasm +of the _Devil's Thoughts_. The poem created something like a +_furore_, and sold a large reissue of the number of the _Morning +Post_ in which it appeared. Nevertheless it is from the metrical point +of view doggerel, as indeed the author admits, three of its most smoothly- +flowing stanzas being from the hand of Southey, while there is nothing in +its boisterous political drollery to put its composition beyond the reach +of any man of strong partisan feelings and a turn for street-humour. +_Fire Famine and Slaughter_, on the other hand, is literary in +every sense of the word, requiring indeed, and very urgently, to insist +on its character as literature, in order to justify itself against the +charge of inhuman malignity. Despite the fact that "letters four do +form his name," it is of course an idealised statesman, and not the +real flesh and blood Mr. Pitt, whom the sister furies, Fire, Famine, +and Slaughter, extol as their patron in these terrible lines. The poem +must be treated as what lawyers call an "A. B. case." Coleridge must be +supposed to be lashing certain alphabetical symbols arranged in a +certain order. This idealising process is perfectly easy and familiar +to everybody with the literary sense. The deduction for "poetic +license" is just as readily, though it does not, of course, require to +be as frequently, made with respect to the hyperbole of denunciation as +with respect to that of praise. Nor need we doubt that this deduction +had in fact been made by all intelligent readers long before that +agitating dinner at Mr. Sotheby's, which Coleridge describes with such +anxious gravity in his apologetic preface to the republication of the +lines. On the whole one may pretty safely accept De Quincey's view of +the true character of this incident as related by him in his own +inimitable fashion, namely, that it was in the nature of an elaborate +hoax, played off at the poet's expense. [3] The malice of the piece is, +as De Quincey puts it, quite obviously a "malice of the understanding +and fancy," and not of the heart. There is significance in the mere +fact that the poem was deliberately published by Coleridge two years +after its composition, when the vehemence of his political animosities +had much abated. Written in 1796, it did not appear in the _Morning +Post_ till January 1798. + +He was now, however, about to draw closer his connection with the +newspaper press. Soon after his return from Germany he was solicited +to "undertake the literary and political department in the _Morning +Post_," and acceded to the proposal "on condition that the paper +should thenceforward be conducted on certain fixed and announced +principles, and that he should be neither obliged nor requested to +deviate from them in favour of any party or any event." Accordingly, +from December 1799 until about midsummer of 1800, Coleridge became a +regular contributor of political articles to this journal, sometimes +to the number of two or three in one week. At the end of the period +of six months he quitted London, and his contributions became +necessarily less frequent, but they were continued (though with two +apparent breaks of many months in duration) [4] until the close of +the year 1802. It would seem, however, that nothing but Coleridge's +own disinclination prevented this connection from taking a +form in which it would have profoundly modified his whole future +career. In a letter to Mr. Poole, dated March 1800, he informs his +friend that if he "had the least love of money" he could "make sure of +£2000 a year, for that Stuart had offered him half shares in his two +papers, the _Morning Post_ and the _Courier_, if he would devote +himself to them in conjunction with their proprietor. But I told +him," he continues, "that I would not give up the country and the lazy +reading of old folios for two thousand times two thousand pounds,--in +short, that beyond £350 a year I considered money as a real evil." +Startlingly liberal as this offer will appear to the journalist, it +seems really to have been made. For, writing long afterwards to Mr. +Nelson Coleridge, Mr. Stuart says: "Could Coleridge and I place +ourselves thirty years back, and he be so far a man of business as to +write three or four hours a day, there is nothing I would not pay for +his assistance. I would take him into partnership, and I would enable +him to make a large fortune." Nor is there any reason to think that the +bargain would have been a bad one for the proprietor from the strictly +commercial point of view. Coleridge in later years may no doubt have +overrated the effect of his own contributions on the circulation of the +_Morning Post_, but it must have been beyond question considerable, +and would in all likelihood have become far greater if he could have +been induced to devote himself more closely to the work of journalism. +For the fact is--and it is a fact for which the current conception of +Coleridge's intellectual character does not altogether prepare one--that +he was a workman of the very first order of excellence in this curious +craft. The faculties which go to the attainment of such excellence are +not perhaps among the highest distinctions of the human mind, but, such +as they are, they are specific and well marked; they are by no means the +necessary accompaniments even of the most conspicuous literary power, +and they are likely rather to suffer than to profit by association with +great subtlety of intellect or wide philosophic grasp. It is not to the +advantage of the journalist, as such, that he should see too many +things at a time, or too far into any one thing, and even the gifts of +an active imagination and an abundant vocabulary are each of them +likely to prove a snare. To be wholly successful, the journalist--at +least the English journalist--must not be too eloquent, or too witty, +or too humorous, or too ingenious, or too profound. Yet the English +reader likes, or thinks he likes, eloquence; he has a keen sense of +humour, and a fair appreciation of wit; and he would be much hurt if he +were told that ingenuity and profundity were in themselves distasteful +to him. How, then, to give him enough of these qualities to please and +not enough to offend him--as much eloquence as will stir his emotions, +but not enough to arouse his distrust; as much wit as will carry home +the argument, but not enough to make him doubt its sincerity; as much +humour as will escape the charge of levity, as much ingenuity as can be +displayed without incurring suspicion, and as much profundity as may +impress without bewildering? This is a problem which is fortunately +simplified for most journalists by the fact of their possessing these +qualities in no more than, if in so much as, the minimum required. But +Coleridge, it must be remembered, possessed most of them in +embarrassing superfluity. Not all of them indeed, for, though he could +be witty and at times humorous, his temptations to excess in these +respects were doubtless not considerable. But as for his eloquence, he +was from his youth upwards _Isoo torrentior_, his dialectical +ingenuity was unequalled, and in disquisition of the speculative order +no man was so apt as he to penetrate more deeply into his subject than +most of his readers would care to follow him. _À priori_, +therefore, one would have expected that Coleridge's instincts would +have led him to rhetorise too much in his diction, to refine too much +in his arguments, and to philosophise too much in his reflections, to +have hit the popular taste as a journalist, and that at the age of +eight-and-twenty he would have been unable to subject these tendencies +either to the artistic repression of the maturer writer or to the +tactical restraints of the trained advocate. This eminently natural +assumption, however, is entirely rebutted by the facts. Nothing is more +remarkable in Coleridge's contributions to the _Morning Post_ than +their thoroughly workmanlike character from the journalistic point of +view, their avoidance of "viewiness," their strict adherence to the one +or two simple points which he is endeavouring at any particular +juncture in politics to enforce upon his readers, and the steadiness +with which he keeps his own and his readers' attention fixed on the +special political necessities of the hour. His articles, in short, +belong to that valuable class to which, while it gives pleasure to the +cultivated reader, the most commonplace and Philistine man of business +cannot refuse the to him supreme praise of being eminently "practical." +They hit the nail on the head in nearly every case, and they take the +plainest and most direct route to their point, dealing in rhetoric and +metaphor only so far as the strictly "business" ends of the argument +appear to require. Nothing, for instance, could have been better done, +better reasoned and written, more skilfully adapted throughout to the +English taste, than Coleridge's criticism (3lst Dec. 1799) on the new +constitution established by Bonaparte and Sieyes on the foundation of +the Consulate, with its eighty senators, the "creatures of a renegade +priest, himself the creature of a foreign mercenary, its hundred +tribunes who are to talk and do nothing, and its three hundred +legislators whom the constitution orders to be silent." What a +ludicrous Purgatory, adds he, "for three hundred Frenchmen!" Very +vigorous, moreover, is he on the ministerial rejection of the French +proposals of peace in 1800, arguing against the continuance of the war +on the very sound anti-Jacobin ground that if it were unsuccessful it +would inflame French ambition anew, and, if successful, repeat the +experience of the results of rendering France desperate, and simply +reanimate Jacobinism. + +Effective enough too, for the controversial needs of the moment, +was the argument that if France were known, as Ministers pretended, +to be insincere in soliciting peace, "Ministers would certainly treat +with her, since they would again secure the support of the British +people in the war, and expose the ambition of the enemy;" and that, +therefore, the probability was that the British Government knew +France to be sincere, and shrank from negotiation lest it should +expose their own desire to prosecute the war. [5] Most happy, again, +is his criticism of Lord Grenville's note, with its references +to the unprovoked aggression of France (in the matter of the opening of +the Scheldt, etc.) as the sole cause and origin of the war. "If this +were indeed true, in what ignorance must not Mr. Pitt and Mr. Windham +have kept the poor Duke of Portland, who declared in the House of Lords +that the cause of the war was the maintenance of the Christian +religion?" + +To add literary excellence of the higher order to the peculiar +qualities which give force to the newspaper article is for a +journalist, of course, a "counsel of perfection;" but it remains to be +remarked that Coleridge did make this addition in a most conspicuous +manner. Mrs. H. N. Coleridge's three volumes of her father's _Essays +on his own Times_ deserve to live as literature apart altogether +from their merits as journalism. Indeed among the articles in the +_Morning Post_ between 1799 and 1802 may be found some of the +finest specimens of Coleridge's maturer prose style. The character of +Pitt, which appeared on 19th March 1800, is as remarkable for its +literary merits as it is for the almost humorous political perversity +which would not allow the Minister any single merit except that which +he owed to the sedulous rhetorical training received by him from his +father, viz. "a premature and unnatural dexterity in the combination of +words." [6] The letters to Fox, again, though a little artificialised +perhaps by reminiscences of Junius, are full of weight and dignity. But +by far the most piquant illustration of Coleridge's peculiar power is +to be found in the comparison between his own version of Pitt's speech +of 17th February 1800, on the continuance of the war, with the report +of it which appeared in the _Times_ of that date. With the +exception of a few unwarranted elaborations of the arguments here and +there, the two speeches are in substance identical; but the effect of +the contrast between the minister's cold state-paper periods and the +life and glow of the poet-journalist's style is almost comic. Mr. +Gillman records that Canning, calling on business at the editor's, +inquired, as others had done, who was the reporter of the speech for +the _Morning Post_, and, on being told, remarked drily that the +report "did more credit to his head than to his memory." + +On the whole one can well understand Mr. Stuart's anxiety to secure +Coleridge's permanent collaboration with him in the business of +journalism; and it would be possible to maintain, with less of paradox +than may at first sight appear, that it would have been better not only +for Coleridge himself but for the world at large if the editor's efforts +had been successful. It would indeed have been bowing the neck to the +yoke; but there are some natures upon which constraint of that sort +exercises not a depressing but a steadying influence. What, after all, +would the loss in hours devoted to a comparatively inferior class of +literary labour have amounted to when compared with the gain in much- +needed habits of method and regularity, and--more valuable than all to +an intellect like Coleridge's,--in the constant reminder that human +life is finite and the materials of human speculation infinite, and +that even a world-embracing mind must apportion its labour to its day? +There is, however, the great question of health to be considered-- +_the_ question, as every one knows, of Coleridge's whole career and +life. If health was destined to give way, in any event--if its +collapse, in fact, was simply the cause of all the lamentable external +results which followed it, while itself due only to predetermined +internal conditions over which the sufferer had no control--then to be +sure _cadit qu'stio_. At London or at the Lakes, among newspaper +files or old folios, Coleridge's life would in that case have run the +same sad course; and his rejection of Mr. Stuart's offer becomes a +matter of no particular interest to disappointed posterity. But be that +as it may, the "old folios" won the day. In the summer of 1800 Coleridge +quitted London, and having wound up his affairs at his then place of +residence, removed with his wife and children to a new and beautiful +home in that English Lake country with which his name was destined, +like those of Southey and Wordsworth, to be enduringly associated. + + +FOOTNOTES + +1. De Quincey's error, in supposing that Coleridge's visit to Germany +to "complete his education" was made at an earlier date than this +journey with the Wordsworths, is a somewhat singular mistake for one so +well acquainted with the facts of Coleridge's life. Had we not his own +statement that this of 1798 was the first occasion of his quitting his +native country, it so happens that we can account in England for nearly +every month of his time from his leaving Cambridge until this date. + + +2. It has only within a comparatively recent period been ascertained +that the visit of the Wordsworths to Germany was itself another result +of Thomas Wedgwood's generous appreciation of literary merit. It +appears, on the incontrovertible testimony of the Wedgwoods' accounts +with their agents at Hamburg, that the expenses of all three travellers +were defrayed by their friend at home. The credits opened for them +amounted, during the course of their stay abroad, to some £260.--Miss +Meteyard's _A Group of Englishmen_, p. 99. + +3. After quoting the +two concluding lines of the poem, "Fire's" rebuke of her inconstant +sisters, in the words + + "I alone am faithful, I + Cling to him everlastingly," + +De Quincey proceeds: "The sentiment is diabolical; and the question +argued at the London dinner-table (Mr. Sotheby's) was 'Could the writer +have been other than a devil?'... Several of the great guns among the +literary body were present--in particular Sir Walter Scott, and he, we +believe, with his usual good nature, took the apologetic side of the +dispute; in fact, he was in the secret. Nobody else, barring the +author, knew at first whose good name was at stake. The scene must have +been high. The company kicked about the poor diabolic writer's head as +though it had been a tennis-ball. Coleridge, the yet unknown criminal, +absolutely perspired and fumed in pleading for the defendant; the +company demurred; the orator grew urgent; wits began to smoke the case +as an active verb, the advocate to smoke as a neuter verb; the 'fun +grew fast and furious,' until at length the delinquent arose, burning +tears in his eyes, and confessed to an audience now bursting with +stifled laughter (but whom he supposed to be bursting with fiery +indignation), 'Lo, I am he that wrote it.'" + +4. _Sic_ in _Essays on his own Times_ by S. T. C., the +collection of her father's articles made by Mrs. Nelson (Sara) +Coleridge; but without attributing strange error to Coleridge's own +estimate (in the _Biographia Literaria_) of the amount of his +journalistic work, it is impossible to believe that this collection, +forming as it does but two small volumes, and a portion of a third, is +anything like complete. + +5. Alas, that the facts should be so merciless to the most excellent +arguments! Coleridge could not foresee that Napoleon would, years +afterwards, admit in his own Memoirs the insincerity of his +overtures. "I had need of war; a treaty of peace...would have +withered every imagination." And when Mr. Pitt's answer arrived, +"it filled me with a secret satisfaction." + +6. The following passage, too, is curious as showing how polemics, like +history, repeat themselves. "As his reasonings were, so is his +eloquence. One character pervades his whole being. Words on words, +finely arranged, and so dexterously consequent that the whole bears the +semblance of argument and still keeps awake a sense of surprise; but, +when all is done, nothing rememberable has been said; no one +philosophical remark, no one image, not even a pointed aphorism. Not a +sentence of Mr. Pitt's has ever been quoted, or formed the favourite +phrase of the day--a thing unexampled in any man of equal reputation." +With the alteration of one word--the proper name--this passage might +have been taken straight from some political diatribe of to-day. + + + + +CHAPTER V. + +Life at Keswick--Second part of _Christabel_--Failing health--Resort +to opium--The _Ode to Dejection_--Increasing restlessness--Visit to Malta. + +[1800-1804.] + + +We are now approaching the turning-point, moral and physical, of +Coleridge's career. The next few years determined not only his destiny +as a writer but his life as a man. Between his arrival at Keswick in +the summer of 1800 and his departure for Malta in the spring of 1804 +that fatal change of constitution, temperament, and habits which +governed the whole of his subsequent history had fully established +itself. Between these two dates he was transformed from the Coleridge +of whom his young fellow-students in Germany have left us so pleasing a +picture into the Coleridge whom distressed kinsmen, alienated friends, +and a disappointed public were to have before them for the remainder of +his days. Here, then, at Keswick, and in these first two or three years +of the century--here or nowhere is the key to the melancholy mystery to +be found. + +It is probable that only those who have gone with some +minuteness into the facts of this singular life are aware how great was +the change effected during this very short period of time. When +Coleridge left London for the Lake country he had not completed his +eight-and-twentieth year. Before he was thirty he wrote that _Ode to +Dejection_ in which his spiritual and moral losses are so +pathetically bewailed. His health and spirits, his will and habits, may +not have taken any unalterable bent for the worse until 1804, the year +of his departure for Malta--the date which I have thought it safest to +assign as the definitive close of the earlier and happier period of his +life; but undoubtedly the change had fully manifested itself more than +two years before. And a very great and painful one it assuredly was. We +know from the recorded evidence of Dr. Carrlyon and others that +Coleridge was full of hope and gaiety, full of confidence in himself +and of interest in life during his few months' residence in Germany. +The _annus mirabilis_ of his poetic life was but two years behind +him, and his achievements of 1797-98 seemed to him but a mere earnest +of what he was destined to accomplish. His powers of mental +concentration were undiminished, as his student days at Göttingen +sufficiently proved; his conjugal and family affections, as Dr. +Carrlyon notes for us, were still unimpaired; his own verse gives signs +of a home-sickness and a yearning for his own fireside which were in +melancholy contrast with the restlessness of his later years. Nay, even +after his return to England, and during the six months of his regular +work on the _Morning Post_, the vigour of his political articles +entirely negatives the idea that any relaxation of intellectual energy +had as yet set in. Yet within six months of his leaving London for +Keswick there begins a progressive decline in Coleridge's literary +activity in every form. The second part of _Christabel_, beautiful +but inferior to the first, was composed in the autumn of 1800, and for +the next two years, so far as the higher forms of literature are +concerned, "the rest is silence." The author of the prefatory memoir in +the edition of Coleridge's _Poetical and Dramatic Works_ (1880), +enumerates some half-dozen slight pieces contributed to the _Morning +Post_ in 1801, but declares that Coleridge's poetical contributions +to this paper during 1802 were "very rich and varied, and included the +magnificent ode entitled _Dejection_." Only the latter clause of +this statement is entitled, I think, to command our assent. Varied +though the list may be, it is hardly to be described as "rich." It +covers only about seven weeks in the autumn of 1802, and, with the +exception of the _Lovers' Resolution_ and the "magnificent ode" +referred to, the pieces are of the shortest and slightest kind. Nor is +it accurate to say that the "political articles of the same period were +also numerous and important." On the contrary, it would appear from an +examination of Mrs. H. N. Coleridge's collection that her father's +contributions to the _Post_ between his departure from London and +the autumn of 1802 were few and intermittent, and in August 1803 the +proprietorship of that journal passed out of Mr. Stuart's hands. It is, +in short, I think, impossible to doubt that very shortly after his +migration to the Lake country he practically ceased not only to write +poetry but to produce any mentionable quantity of _complete_ work +in the prose form. His mind, no doubt, was incessantly active +throughout the whole of the deplorable period upon which we are now +entering; but it seems pretty certain that its activity was not poetic +nor even critical, but purely philosophical, and that the products of +that activity went exclusively to _marginalia_ and the pages of +note-books. + +Yet unfortunately we have almost no evidence, personal or +other, from which we can with any certainty construct the +psychological--if one should not rather say the physiological, or +better still, perhaps, the pathological--history of this cardinal epoch +in Coleridge's life. Miss Wordsworth's diary is nearly silent about him +for the next few years; he was living indeed some dozen miles from her +brother at Grasmere, and they could not therefore have been in daily +intercourse. Southey did not come to the Lakes till 1803, and the +records of his correspondence only begin therefore from that date. Mr. +Cottle's _Reminiscences_ are here a blank; Charles Lamb's +correspondence yields little; and though De Quincey has plenty to say +about this period in his characteristic fashion, it must have been +based upon pure gossip, as he cites no authorities, and did not himself +make Coleridge's acquaintance till six years afterwards. This, however, +is at least certain, that his gloomy accounts of his own health begin +from a period at which his satisfaction with his new abode was still as +fresh as ever. The house which he had taken, now historic as the +residence of two famous Englishmen, enjoyed a truly beautiful situation +and the command of a most noble view. It stood in the vale of +Derwentwater, on the bank of the river Greta, and about a mile from the +lake. When Coleridge first entered it, it was uncompleted, and an +arrangement was made by which, after completion, it was to be divided +between the tenant and the landlord, a Mr. Jackson. As it turned out, +however, the then completed portion was shared by them in common, the +other portion, and eventually the whole, being afterwards occupied by +Southey. In April 1801, some eight or nine months after his taking +possession of Greta Hall, Coleridge thus describes it to its future +occupant:-- + +"Our house stands on a low hill, the whole front of which +is one field and an enormous garden, nine-tenths of which is a nursery +garden. Behind the house is an orchard and a small wood on a steep +slope, at the foot of which is the river Greta, which winds round and +catches the evening's light in the front of the house. In front we have +a giant camp--an encamped army of tent-like mountains which, by an +inverted arch, gives a view of another vale. On our right the lovely +vale and the wedge-shaped lake of Bassenthwaite; and on our left +Derwentwater and Lodore full in view, and the fantastic mountains of +Borrowdale. Behind is the massy Skiddaw, smooth, green, high, with two +chasms and a tent-like ridge in the larger. A fairer scene you have not +seen in all your wanderings." + +There is here no note of discontent with +the writer's surroundings; and yet, adds Mr. Cuthbert Southey in his +_Life and Correspondence_ of his father, the remainder of this +letter was filled by Coleridge with "a most gloomy account of his +health." Southey writes him in reply that he is convinced that his +friend's "complaint is gouty, that good living is necessary and a good +climate." In July of the same year he received a visit from Southey at +Greta Hall, and one from Charles and Mary Lamb in the following summer, +and it is probable that during such intervals of pleasurable excitement +his health and spirits might temporarily rally. But henceforward and +until his departure for Malta we gather nothing from any source as to +Coleridge's _normal_ condition of body and mind which is not +unfavourable, and it is quite certain that he had long before 1804 +enslaved himself to that fatal drug which was to remain his tyrant for +the rest of his days. + +When, then, and how did this slavery begin? What +was the precise date of Coleridge's first experiences of opium, and +what the original cause of his taking it? Within what time did its use +become habitual? To what extent was the decline of his health the +effect of the evil habit, and to what, if any, extent its cause? And +how far, if at all, can the deterioration of his character and powers +be attributed to a decay of physical constitution, brought about by +influences beyond the sufferer's own control? + +Could every one of these questions be completely answered, we should be +in a position to solve the very obscure and painful problem before us; +but though some of them can be answered with more or less approach to +completeness, there is only one of them which can be finally disposed +of. It is certain, and it is no doubt matter for melancholy +satisfaction to have ascertained it, that Coleridge first had +recourse to opium as an anodyne. It was Nature's revolt from pain, and +not her appetite for pleasure, which drove him to the drug; and though +De Quincey, with his almost comical malice, remarks that, though +Coleridge began in the desire to obtain relief "there is no proof that +he did not end in voluptuousness," there is on the other hand no proof +whatever that he did so end--_until the habit was formed_. It is +quite consistent with probability, and only accords with Coleridge's +own express affirmations, to believe that it was the medicinal efficacy +of opium, and this quality of it alone, which induced him to resort to +it again and again until his senses contracted that well-known and +insatiable craving for the peculiar excitement, "voluptuous" only to +the initiated, which opium-intoxication creates. But let Coleridge +speak on this point for himself. Writing in April 1826 he says:-- + +"I wrote a few stanzas three-and-twenty years ago, soon after my eyes +had been opened to the true nature of the habit into which I had been +ignorantly deluded by the seeming magic effects of opium, in the +sudden removal of a supposed rheumatic affection, attended with +swellings in my knees and palpitation of the heart and pains all over +me, by which I had been bed-ridden for nearly six months. Unhappily +among my neighbours' and landlord's books were a large number of +medical reviews and magazines. I had always a fondness (a common case, +but most mischievous turn with reading men who are at all dyspeptic) +for dabbling in medical writings; and in one of these reviews I met a +case which I fancied very like my own, in which a cure had been +effected by the Kendal Black Drop. In an evil hour I procured it: it +worked miracles--the swellings disappeared, the pains vanished. I was +all alive, and all around me being as ignorant as myself, nothing +could exceed my triumph. I talked of nothing else, prescribed the +newly-discovered panacea for all complaints, and carried a little +about with me not to lose any opportunity of administering 'instant +relief and speedy cure' to all complainers, stranger or friend, gentle +or simple. Alas! it is with a bitter smile, a laugh of gall and +bitterness, that I recall this period of unsuspecting delusion, and +how I first became aware of the Maelstrom, the fatal whirlpool to +which I was drawing, just when the current was beyond my strength to +stem. The state of my mind is truly portrayed in the following +effusion, for God knows! that from that time I was the victim of pain +and terror, nor had I at any time taken the flattering poison as a +stimulus or for any craving after pleasurable sensation." + +The "effusion" in question has parted company with the autobiographical +note, and the author of the prefatory memoir above quoted conjectures +it to have been a little poem entitled the _Visionary Hope_; but I am +myself of opinion, after a careful study of both pieces, that it is +more probably the _Pains of Sleep_, which moreover is known to +have been written in 1803. But whichever it be, its date is fixed in +that year by the statement in the autobiographical note of 1826 that +the stanzas referred to in it were written "twenty-three years ago." +Thus, then, we have the two facts established, that the opium-taking +habit had its origin in a bodily ailment, and that at some time in +1803 that habit had become confirmed. The disastrous experiment in +amateur therapeutics, which was the means of implanting it, could not +have taken place, according to the autobiographical note, until at +least six months after Coleridge's arrival at Keswick, and perhaps not +for some months later yet. At any rate, it seems tolerably certain +that it was not till the spring of 1801, when the climate of the +Lake country first began to tell unfavourably on his health, that +the "Kendal Black Drop" was taken. Possibly it may have been about +the time (April 1801) when he wrote the letter to Southey which has +been quoted above, and which, it will be remembered, contained "so +gloomy an account of his health." How painfully ailing he was at this +time we know from a variety of sources, from some of which we also +gather that he must have been a sufferer in more or less serious +forms from his boyhood upwards. Mr. Gillman, for instance, who speaks +on this point with the twofold authority of confidant and medical +expert, records a statement of Coleridge's to the effect that, as a +result of such schoolboy imprudences as "swimming over the New River +in my clothes and remaining in them, full half the time from seventeen +to eighteen was passed by me in the sick ward of Christ's Hospital, +afflicted with jaundice and rheumatic fever." From these +indiscretions and their consequences "may be dated," Mr. Gillman +thinks, "all his bodily sufferings in future life." That he was a +martyr to periodical attacks of rheumatism for some years before his +migration to Keswick is a conclusion resting upon something more than +conjecture. The _Ode to the Departing Year_ (1796) was written, as +he has himself told us, under a severe attack of rheumatism in the +head. In 1797 he describes himself in ill health, and as forced to +retire on that account to the "lonely farmhouse between Porlock and +London on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire," where +_Kubla Khan_ was written. [1] + +Thus much is, moreover, certain, +that whatever were Coleridge's health and habits during the first two +years of his residence at Keswick, his career as a poet--that is to +say, as a poet of the first order--was closed some months before that +period had expired. The ode entitled _Dejection_, to which +reference has so often been made, was written on the 4th of April 1802, +and the evidential importance which attaches, in connection with the +point under inquiry, to this singularly pathetic utterance has been +almost universally recognised. Coleridge has himself cited its most +significant passage in the _Biographia Literaria_ as supplying the +best description of his mental state at the time when it was written. +De Quincey quotes it with appropriate comments in his _Coleridge and +Opium-Eating_. Its testimony is reverently invoked by the poet's son +in the introductory essay prefixed by him to his edition of his +father's works. The earlier stanzas are, however, so necessary to the +comprehension of Coleridge's mood at this time that a somewhat long +extract must be made. In the opening stanza he expresses a longing that +the storm which certain atmospheric signs of a delusively calm evening +appear to promise might break forth, so that + + "Those sounds which oft have raised me, whilst they awed, + And sent my soul abroad, + Might now perhaps their wonted impulse give, + Might startle this dull pain, and make it move and live." + +And thus, with ever-deepening sadness, the poem proceeds: + + "A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear, + A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief, + Which finds no natural outlet, no relief, + In word, or sigh, or tear-- + O Lady! in this wan and heartless mood, + To other thoughts by yonder throstle woo'd, + All this long eve, so balmy and serene, + Have I been gazing on the western sky, + And its peculiar tint of yellow green: + And still I gaze--and with how blank an eye! + And those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars, + That give away their motion to the stars; + Those stars, that glide behind them or between, + Now sparkling, now bedimmed, but always seen: + Yon crescent Moon as fixed as if it grew + In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue; + I see them all so excellently fair, + I see, not feel how beautiful they are! + + "My genial spirits fail, + And what can these avail + To lift the smothering weight from off my breast? + It were a vain endeavour, + Though I should gaze for ever + On that green light that lingers in the west: + I may not hope from outward forms to win + The passion and the life, whose fountains are within. + + "O Lady! we receive but what we give, + And in our life alone does nature live: + Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud! + And would we aught behold, of higher worth, + Than that inanimate cold world allowed + To the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd, + Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth, + A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud + Enveloping the earth-- + And from the soul itself must there be sent + A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth, + Of all sweet sounds the life and element! + + "O pure of heart! thou need'st not ask of me + What this strong music in the soul may be! + What, and wherein it doth exist, + This light, this glory, this fair luminous mist, + This beautiful and beauty-making power. + Joy, virtuous Lady! Joy that ne'er was given, + Save to the pure, and in their purest hour, + Life, and Life's effluence, cloud at once and shower, + Joy, Lady! is the spirit and the power, + Which, wedding Nature to us, gives in dower + A new Earth and new Heaven, + Undreamt of by the sensual and the proud-- + Joy is the sweet voice, Joy the luminous cloud-- + We in ourselves rejoice! + And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight, + All melodies the echoes of that voice, + All colours a suffusion from that light." + +And then follows the much quoted, profoundly touching, deeply significant +stanza to which we have referred:-- + + "There was a time when, though my path was rough, + This joy within me dallied with distress, + And all misfortunes were but as the stuff + Whence Fancy made me dreams of happiness: + For hope grew round me, like the twining vine, + And fruits, and foliage, not my own, seemed mine. + But now afflictions how me down to earth: + Nor care I that they rob me of my mirth, + But O! each visitation + Suspends what nature gave me at my birth, + My shaping spirit of Imagination. + For not to think of what I needs must feel, + But to be still and patient, all I can; + And haply by abstruse research to steal + From my own nature all the natural Man-- + This was my sole resource, my only plan: + Till that which suits a part infects the whole, + And now is almost grown the habit of my Soul." + +Sadder lines than these were never perhaps written by any poet in +description of his own feelings. And what gives them their peculiar +sadness--as also, of course, their special biographical value--is that +they are not, like Shelley's similarly entitled stanzas, the mere +expression of a passing mood. They are the record of a life change, a +veritable threnody over a spiritual death. For there can be no doubt-- +his whole subsequent history goes to show it--that Coleridge's "shaping +spirit of Imagination" was in fact dead when these lines were written. +To a man of stronger moral fibre a renascence of the poetical instinct +in other forms might, as I have suggested above, been possible; but the +poet of _Christabel_ and the _Ancient Mariner_ was dead. The +metaphysician had taken his place, and was striving, in abstruse +research, to live in forgetfulness of the loss. Little more, that is to +say, than a twelvemonth after the composition of the second part of +_Christabel_ the impulse which gave birth to it had passed away +for ever. Opium-taking had doubtless begun by this time--may +conceivably indeed have begun nearly a year before--and the mere +_mood_ of the poem, the temporary phase of feeling which directed +his mind inwards into deeper reflections on its permanent state, is no +doubt strongly suggestive, in its excessive depression, of the terrible +reaction which is known to follow upon opium-excitement. But, I +confess, it seems to me improbable that even the habitual use of the +stimulant for so comparatively short a time as twelve months could have +produced so profound a change in Coleridge's intellectual nature. I +cannot but think that De Quincey overstates the case in declaring that +"opium killed Coleridge as a poet," though it may well be that, after +the collapse of health, which appears to me to have been the real +_causa causans_ in the matter, had killed the poet as we know him, +opium prevented his resurrection in another and it may be but little +inferior form. On the whole, in fact, the most probable account of this +all-important era in Coleridge's life appears to me to be this: that in +the course of 1801, as he was approaching his thirtieth year, a +distinct change for the worse--precipitated possibly, as Mr. Gillman +thinks, by the climate of his new place of abode--took place in his +constitution; that his rheumatic habit of body, and the dyspeptic +trouble by which it was accompanied became confirmed; and that the +severe attacks of the acute form of the malady which he underwent +produced such a permanent lowering of his vitality and animal spirits +as, _first_, to extinguish the creative impulse, and _then_ +to drive him to the physical anodyne of opium and to the mental +stimulant of metaphysics. + +From the summer of 1801, at any rate, his _malaise_, both of mind +and body, appears to have grown apace. Repeated letters from Southey +allow us to see how deeply concerned he was at this time about his +friend's condition. Plans of foreign travel are discussed between +them, and Southey endeavours in vain to spur his suffering and +depressed correspondent to "the assertion of his supremacy" in some +new literary work. But, with the exception of his occasional +contributions to the press, whatever he committed to paper +during these years exists only, if at all, in a fragmentary form. And +his restlessness, continually on the increase, appears by the end of +1802 to have become ungovernable. In November of that year he eagerly +accepted an offer from Thomas Wedgwood to become his companion on a +tour, and he spent this and the greater part of the following month in +South Wales with some temporary advantage, it would seem, to his health +and spirits. "Coleridge," writes Mr. Wedgwood to a friend, "is all +kindness to me, and in prodigious favour here. He is quite easy, +cheerful, and takes great pains to make himself pleasant. He is +willing, indeed desirous, to accompany me to any part of the globe." +"Coll and I," he writes on another occasion, the abbreviation of name +having been suggested to him by Coleridge himself, "harmonise +amazingly," and adds that his companion "takes long rambles, and writes +a great deal." But the fact that such changes of air and scene produced +no permanent effect upon the invalid after his return to his own home +appears to show that now, at any rate, his fatal habit had obtained a +firm hold upon him. And his "writing a great deal resulted" only in the +filling of many note-books, and perhaps the sketching out of many of +those vast schemes of literary labour of which he was destined to leave +so remarkable a collection at his death. One such we find him +forwarding to Southey in the August of 1803--the plan of a Bibliotheca +Britannica, or "History of British Literature, bibliographical, +biographical, and critical," in eight volumes. The first volume was to +contain a "complete history of all Welsh, Saxon, and Erse books that +are not translations, but the native growth of Britain;" to accomplish +which, writes Coleridge, "I will with great pleasure join you in +learning Welsh and Erse." The second volume was to contain the history +of English poetry and poets, including "all prose truly poetical." The +third volume "English prose, considered as to style, as to eloquence, +as to general impressiveness; a history of styles and manners, their +causes, their birthplace and parentage, their analysis." The fourth +volume would take up "the history of metaphysics, theology, medicine, +alchemy; common, canon, and Roman law from Alfred to Henry VII." The +fifth would "carry on metaphysics and ethics to the present day in the +first half, and comprise in the second half the theology of all the +reformers." In the sixth and seventh volumes were to be included "all +the articles you (Southey) can get on all the separate arts and +sciences that have been treated of in books since the Reformation; and +by this time," concludes the enthusiastic projector, "the book, if it +answered at all, would have gained so high a reputation that you need +not fear having whom you liked to write the different articles-- +medicine, surgery, chemistry, etc.; navigation, travellers' voyages, +etc., etc." There is certainly a melancholy humour in the formulation +of so portentous a scheme by a man who was at this moment wandering +aimlessly among the lakes and mountains, unable to settle down to any +definite piece of literary work, or even to throw off a fatal habit, +which could not fail, if persevered in, to destroy all power of steady +application in the future. That neither the comic nor the pathetic +element in the situation was lost upon Southey is evident from his +half-sad, half-satirical, wholly winning reply. "Your plan," he writes, +"is too good, too gigantic, quite beyond my powers. If you had my +tolerable state of health and that love of steady and productive +employment which is now grown into a necessary habit with me, if you +were to execute and would execute it, it would be beyond all doubt the +most valuable work of any age or any country; but I cannot fill up such +an outline. No man can better feel where he fails than I do, and to +rely upon you for whole quartos! Dear Coleridge, the smile that comes +with that thought is a very melancholy one; and if Edith saw me now she +would think my eyes were weak again, when in truth the humour that +covers them springs from another cause." A few weeks after this +interchange of correspondence Coleridge was once again to prove how far +he was from possessing Southey's "tolerable state of health." +Throughout the whole of this year he had been more restless than ever. +In January 1803 we find him staying with Southey at Bristol, "suffering +terribly from the climate, and talking of going abroad." A week later +he is at Stowey, planning schemes, not destined to be realised, of +foreign travel with Wedgwood. Returning again to Keswick, he started, +after a few months' quiescence, on 15th August, in company with +Wordsworth and his sister, for a tour in Scotland, but after a +fortnight he found himself too ill to proceed. The autumn rains set in, +and "poor Coleridge," writes Miss Wordsworth, "being very unwell, +determined to send his clothes to Edinburgh, and make the best of his +way thither, being afraid to face much wet weather in an open +carriage." It is possible, however, that his return to Keswick may have +been hastened by the circumstance that Southey, who had paid a brief +visit to the Lake country two years before, was expected in a few days +at the house which was destined to be his abode for the longest portion +of his life. He arrived at Greta Hall on 7th September 1803, and from +time to time during the next six months his correspondence gives us +occasional glimpses of Coleridge's melancholy state. At the end of +December, his health growing steadily worse, he conceived the project +of a voyage to Madeira, and quitted Keswick with the intention, after +paying a short visit to the Wordsworths, of betaking himself to London +to make preparations. His stay at Grasmere, however, was longer than he +had counted on. "He was detained for a month by a severe attack of +illness, induced, if his description is to be relied on, by the use of +narcotics. [2] Unsuspicious of the cause, Mrs. and Miss Wordsworth +nursed him with the tenderest affection, while the poet himself, +usually a parsimonious man, forced upon him, to use Coleridge's own +words, a hundred pounds in the event of his going to Madeira, and his +friend Stuart offered to befriend him." From Grasmere he went to +Liverpool, where he spent a pleasant week with his old Unitarian +friend, Dr. Crompton, and arrived in London at the close of 1803. Here, +however, his plans were changed. Malta was substituted for Madeira, in +response to an invitation from his friend Mr., afterwards Sir John, +Stoddart, then resident as judge in the Mediterranean island. By 12th +March, as we gather from the Southey correspondence, the change of +arrangements had been made. Two days afterwards he receives a letter of +valediction from his "old friend and brother" at Greta Hall, and on 2d +April 1804, he sailed from England in the _Speedwell_, dropping +anchor sixteen days later in Valetta harbour. + + +FOOTNOTES + +1. Were it not for Coleridge's express statement that he first took +opium at Keswick, one would be inclined to attribute the gorgeous but +formless imagery of that poem to the effects of the stimulant. It is +certainly very like a metrical version of one of the pleasant variety +of opium-dreams described in De Quincey's poetic prose. + +2. See Miss Meteyard (_A Group of Englishmen_, p. 223). Her +evidence, however, on any point otherwise doubtful in Coleridge's +history should be received with caution, as her estimate of the poet +certainly errs somewhat on the side of excessive harshness. + + + + +CHAPTER VI + +Stay at Malta--Its injurious effects--Return to England--Meeting +with De Quincey--Residence in London--First series of lectures. + +[1806-1809.] + + +Never was human being destined so sadly and signally to illustrate the +_coelum non animum_ aphorism as the unhappy passenger on the +_Speedwell_. Southey shall describe his condition when he left +England; and his own pathetic lines to William Wordsworth will picture +him to us on his return. "You are in great measure right about +Coleridge," writes the former to his friend Rickman, "he is worse in +body than you seem to believe; but the main cause lies in his own +management of himself, or rather want of management. His mind is in a +perpetual St. Vitus's dance--eternal activity without action. At times +he feels mortified that he should have done so little, but this feeling +never produces any exertion. 'I will begin to-morrow,' he says, and +thus he has been all his lifelong letting to-day slip. He has had no +heavy calamities in life, and so contrives to be miserable about +trifles. Poor fellow, there is no one thing which gives me so much pain +as the witnessing such a waste of unequalled powers." Then, after +recalling the case of a highly promising schoolfellow, who had made +shipwreck of his life, and whom "a few individuals only remember with a +sort of horror and affection, which just serves to make them melancholy +whenever they think of him or mention his name," he adds: "This will +not be the case with Coleridge; the _disjecta membra_ will be +found if he does not die early: but having so much to do, so many +errors to weed out of the world which he is capable of eradicating, if +he does die without doing his work, it would half break my heart, for +no human being has had more talents allotted." Such being his closest +friend's account of him, and knowing, as we now do (what Southey +perhaps had no suspicion of at the time), the chief if not the sole or +original cause of his morally nerveless condition, it is impossible not +to feel that he did the worst possible thing for himself in taking this +journey to Malta. In quitting England he cut himself off from those +last possibilities of self-conquest which the society and counsels of +his friends might otherwise have afforded him, and the consequences +were, it is to be feared, disastrous. After De Quincey's incredibly +cool assertion that it was "notorious that Coleridge began the use of +opium, not as a relief from any bodily pain or nervous irritations, +since his constitution was strong and excellent(!), but as a source of +luxurious sensations," we must receive anything which he has to say on +this particular point with the utmost caution; but there is only too +much plausibility in his statement that, Coleridge being necessarily +thrown, while at Malta, "a good deal upon his own resources in the +narrow society of a garrison, he there confirmed and cherished ... his +habit of taking opium in large quantities." Contrary to his +expectations, moreover, the Maltese climate failed to benefit him. At +first, indeed, he did experience some feeling of relief, but +afterwards, according to Mr. Gillman, he spoke of his rheumatic limbs +as "lifeless tools," and of the "violent pains in his bowels, which +neither opium, ether, nor peppermint combined could relieve." + +Occupation, however, was not wanting to him, if occupation +could have availed in the then advanced stage of his case. He early +made the acquaintance of the governor of the island, Sir Alexander +Ball, who, having just lost his secretary by death, requested Cole- +ridge to undertake that official's duties until his successor should be +appointed. By this arrangement the governor and the public service in +all likelihood profited more than the provisional secretary; for +Coleridge's literary abilities proved very serviceable in the +department of diplomatic correspondence. The dignities of the office, +Mr. Gillman tells us, no doubt on Coleridge's own authority, "he never +attempted to support; he was greatly annoyed at what he thought its +unnecessary parade, and he petitioned Sir Alexander Ball to be relieved +from it." The purely mechanical duties of the post, too, appear to have +troubled him. He complains, in one of the journals which he kept during +this period, of having been "for months past incessantly employed in +official tasks, subscribing, examining, administering oaths, auditing, +etc." On the whole it would seem that the burden of his secretarial +employment, though doubtless it would have been found light enough by +any one accustomed to public business, was rather a weariness to the +flesh than a distraction to the mind; while in the meantime a new +symptom of disorder--a difficulty of breathing, to which he was always +afterwards subject--began to manifest itself in his case. Probably he +was glad enough--relieved, in more than one sense of the word--when, in +the autumn of 1805, the new secretary arrived at Malta to take his +place. + +On 27th September Coleridge quitted the island on his homeward +journey _vié_ Italy, stopping for a short time at Syracuse on his +way. At Naples, which he reached on the 15th of December, he made a +longer stay, and in Rome his sojourn lasted some months. Unfortunately, +for a reason which will presently appear, there remains no written +record of his impressions of the Eternal City; and though Mr. Gillman +assures us that the gap is "partly filled by his own verbal account, +repeated at various times to the writer of this memoir," the public of +to-day is only indebted to "the writer of this memoir" for the not very +startling information that Coleridge, "while in Rome, was actively +employed in visiting the great works of art, statues, pictures, +buildings, palaces, etc. etc., observations on which he minuted down +for publication." It is somewhat more interesting to learn that he made +the acquaintance of many literary and artistic notabilities at that +time congregated there, including Tieck, the German poet and novelist, +and the American painter Alston, to whose skill we owe what is reputed +to be the best of his many not easily reconcilable portraits. The loss +of his Roman memoranda was indirectly brought about by a singular +incident, his account of which has met with some undeserved ridicule at +the hands of Tory criticism. When about to quit Rome for England +_vié_ Switzerland and Germany he took the precaution of inquiring +of Baron von Humboldt, brother of the traveller, and then Prussian +Minister at the Court of Rome, whether the proposed route was safe, and +was by him informed that he would do well to keep out of the reach of +Bonaparte, who was meditating the seizure of his person. According to +Coleridge, indeed, an order for his arrest had actually been +transmitted to Rome, and he was only saved from its execution by the +connivance of the "good old Pope," Pius VII., who sent him a passport +and counselled his immediate flight. Hastening to Leghorn, he +discovered an American vessel ready to sail for England, on board of +which he embarked. On the voyage she was chased by a French vessel, +which so alarmed the captain that he compelled Coleridge to throw his +papers, including these precious MSS., overboard. The wrath of the +First Consul against him was supposed to have been excited by his +contributions to the _Morning Post_, an hypothesis which De +Quincey reasonably finds by no means so ridiculous as it appeared to a +certain writer in _Blackwood_, who treated it as the "very +consummation of moonstruck vanity," and compared it to "John Dennis's +frenzy in retreating from the sea-coast under the belief that Louis +XIV. had commissioned commissaries to land on the English shore and +make a dash at his person." It must be remembered, however, that Mr. +Fox, to whose statement on such a point Napoleon would be likely to +attach especial weight, had declared in the House of Commons that the +rupture of the Peace of Amiens had been brought about by certain essays +in the _Morning Post_, and there is certainly no reason to believe +that a tyrant whose animosity against literary or quasi-literary +assailants ranged from Madame de Staël down to the bookseller Palm +would have regarded a man of Coleridge's reputation in letters as +beneath the stoop of his vengeance. + +After an absence of two years and a half Coleridge arrived in England +in August 1806. That his then condition of mind and body was a +profoundly miserable one, and that he himself was acutely conscious +of it, will be seen later on in certain extracts from his correspondence; +but his own _Lines to William Wordsworth_--lines "composed on the +night after his recitation of a poem on the growth of an individual +mind"--contain an even more tragic expression of his state. It was +Wordsworth's pensive retrospect of their earlier years together which +awoke the bitterest pangs of self-reproach in his soul, and wrung from +it the cry which follows:-- + + "Ah! as I listened with a heart forlorn + The pulses of my being beat anew: + And even as life returns upon the drowned, + Life's joy rekindling roused a throng of pains-- + Keen pangs of Love, awakening as a babe + Turbulent, with an outcry in the heart; + And fears self-willed, that shunned the eye of hope; + And hope that scarce would know itself from fear; + Sense of past youth, and manhood come in vain, + And genius given, and knowledge won in vain; + And all which I had culled in wood-walks wild, + And all which patient toil had reared, and all, + Commune with thee had opened out--but flowers + Strewn on my corse, and borne upon my bier, + In the same coffin, for the self-same grave!" + +A dismal and despairing strain indeed, but the situation unhappily was +not less desperate. We are, in fact, entering upon that period of +Coleridge's life--a period, roughly speaking, of about ten years--which +no admirer of his genius, no lover of English letters, no one, it might +even be said, who wishes to think well of human nature, can ever +contemplate without pain. His history from the day of his landing in +England in August 1806 till the day when he entered Mr. Gillman's house +in 1816 is one long and miserable story of self-indulgence and self- +reproach, of lost opportunities, of neglected duties, of unfinished +undertakings. His movements and his occupation for the first year after +his return are not now traceable with exactitude, but his time was +apparently spent partly in London and partly at Grasmere and Keswick. +When in London, Mr. Stuart, who had now become proprietor of the +_Courier_, allowed him to occupy rooms at the office of that +newspaper to save him expense; and Coleridge, though his regular +connection with the _Courier_ did not begin till some years +afterwards, may possibly have repaid the accommodation by occasional +contributions or by assistance to its editor in some other form. It +seems certain, at any rate, that if he was earning no income in this +way he was earning none at all. His friend and patron, Mr. Thomas +Wedgwood, had died while he was in Malta; but the full pension of £150 +per annum bestowed upon him by the two brothers jointly continued to be +paid to him by Josiah, the senior. Coleridge, however, had landed in +England in ignorance of his patron's death. He had wholly neglected to +keep up any correspondence with the Wedgwoods during his stay in Malta, +and though "dreadfully affected" by it, as Mr. Poole records, he seems +to have allowed nearly a year to elapse before communicating with the +surviving brother. The letter which he then wrote deserves quotation, +not only as testimony to his physical and pecuniary condition on his +arrival in England, but as affording a distressing picture of the +morbid state of his emotions and the enfeebled condition of his will. +"As to the reasons for my silence, they are," he incoherently begins, +"impossible, and the numbers of the _causes_ of it, with the +almost weekly expectation for the last eight months of receiving my +books, manuscripts, etc. from Malta, has been itself a cause of +increasing the procrastination which constant ill health, despondency, +domestic distractions, and embarrassment from accidents, equally +unconnected with my will or conduct" [every cause mentioned, it will be +seen, but the true one], "had already seated deep in my very muscles, +as it were. I do not mean to accuse myself of idleness--I have enough +of self-crimination without adding imaginary articles--but in all +things that affect my moral feelings I have sunk under such a strange +cowardice of pain that I have not unfrequently kept letters from +persons dear to me for weeks together unopened. After a most miserable +passage from Leghorn of fifty-five days, during which my life was twice +given over, I found myself again in my native country, ill, penniless, +and worse than homeless. I had been near a month in the country before +I ventured or could summon courage enough to ask a question concerning +you and yours, and yet God Almighty knows that every hour the thought +had been gnawing at my heart. I then for the first time heard of that +event which sounded like my own knell, without its natural hope or +sense of rest. Such shall I be (is the thought that haunts me), but O! +not such; O! with what a different retrospect! But I owe it to justice +to say, Such good I truly can do myself, etc., etc." The rest of this +painfully inarticulate letter is filled with further complaints of ill +health, with further protestations of irresponsibility for the neglect +of duties, and with promises, never to be fulfilled, of composing or +assisting others to compose a memoir of Thomas Wedgwood, who, in +addition to his general repute as a man of culture, had made a special +mark by his speculations in psychology. + +The singular expression, "worse than homeless," and the reference to +domestic distractions, appear to indicate that some estrangement had +already set in between Coleridge and his wife. De Quincey's testimony +to its existence at the time (a month or so later) when he made +Coleridge's acquaintance may, subject to the usual deductions, be +accepted as trustworthy; and, of course, for aught we know, it may +then have been already of some years' standing. That the provocation +to it on the husband's part may be so far antedated is at least a +reasonable conjecture. There may be nothing--in all likelihood there +is nothing--worth attention in De Quincey's gossip about the young +lady, "intellectually very much superior to Mrs. Coleridge, who +became a neighbour and daily companion of Coleridge's walks" at +Keswick. But if there be no foundation for his remarks on "the +mischiefs of a situation which exposed Mrs. Coleridge to an invidious +comparison with a more intellectual person," there is undoubtedly +plenty of point in the immediately following observation that "it +was most unfortunate for Coleridge himself to be continually +compared with one so ideally correct and regular in his habits as Mr. +Southey." The passion of female jealousy assuredly did not need to be +called into play to account for the alienation of Mrs. Coleridge from +her husband. Mrs. Carlyle has left on record her pathetic lament over +the fate of a woman who marries a man of genius; but a man of genius of +the coldly selfish and exacting type of the Chelsea philosopher would +probably be a less severe burden to a woman of housewifely instincts +than the weak, unmethodical, irresolute, shiftless being that Coleridge +had by this time become. After the arrival of the Southeys, Mrs. +Coleridge would indeed have been more than human if she had not looked +with an envious eye upon the contrast between her sister Edith's lot +and her own. For this would give her the added pang of perceiving that +she was specially unlucky in the matter, and that men of genius could +("if they chose," as she would probably, though not perhaps quite +justly have put it) make very good husbands indeed. If one poet could +finish his poems, and pay his tradesmen's bills, and work steadily for +the publishers in his own house without the necessity of periodical +flittings to various parts of the United Kingdom or the Continent, why, +so could another. With such reflections as these Mrs. Coleridge's mind +was no doubt sadly busy during the early years of her residence at the +Lakes, and, since their causes did not diminish but rather increased in +intensity as time went on, the estrangement between them--or rather, to +do Coleridge justice, her estrangement from her husband--had, by 1806, +no doubt become complete. The fatal habit which even up to this time +seems to have been unknown to most of his friends could hardly have +been a secret to his wife, and his four or five years of slavery to it +may well have worn out her patience. + +This single cause indeed, namely, Coleridge's addiction to opium, is +quite sufficient, through the humiliations, discomfort, and privations, +pecuniary and otherwise, for which the vice was no doubt mediately or +immediately responsible, to account for the unhappy issue of a union +which undoubtedly was one of love to begin with, and which seems to +have retained that character for at least six years of its course. +We have noted the language of warm affection in which the "beloved +Sara" is spoken of in the early poems, and up to the time of +Coleridge's stay in Germany his feelings towards his wife remained +evidently unchanged. To his children, of whom three out of the four +born to him had survived, he was deeply attached; and the remarkable +promise displayed by the eldest son, Hartley, and his youngest child +and only daughter, Sara, made them objects of no less interest to his +intellect than to his heart. "Hartley," he writes to Mr. Poole in +1803, "is a strange, strange boy, exquisitely wild, an utter +visionary; like the moon among thin clouds, he moves in a circle +of light of his own making. He alone is a light of his own." And of his +daughter in the same poetic strain: "My meek little Sara is a +remarkably interesting baby, with the finest possible skin, and large +blue eyes, and she smiles as if she were basking in a sunshine as mild +as moonlight of her own quiet happiness." Derwent, a less remarkable +but no less attractive child than his brother and sister (whom he was +destined long to survive), held an equal place in his father's +affections. Yet all these interwoven influences--a deep love of his +children and a sincere attachment to his wife, of whom, indeed, he +never ceased to speak with respect and regard--were as powerless as in +so many thousands of other cases they have been, to brace an enfeebled +will to the task of self-reform. In 1807 "respect and regard" had +manifestly taken the place of any warmer feeling in his mind. Later on +in the letter above quoted he says, "In less than a week I go down to +Ottery, with my children and their mother, from a sense of duty" +(_i.e._ to his brother, the Rev. George Coleridge, who had +succeeded his father as head master of the Ottery St. Mary Grammar +School) "as far as it affects myself, and from a promise made to Mrs. +Coleridge, as far as it affects her, and indeed of a debt of respect to +her for her many praiseworthy qualities." When husbands and wives take +to liquidating debts of this kind, and in this spirit, it is pretty +conclusive evidence that all other accounts between them are +closed. + +The letter from which these extracts have been taken was +written from Aisholt near Bridgewater, where Coleridge was then +staying, with his wife and children, as the guest of a Mr. Price; and +his friend Poole's description to Josiah Wedgwood of his state at that +time is significant as showing that some at least of his intimate +acquaintances had no suspicion of the real cause of his bodily and +mental disorders. "I admire him," Poole writes, "and pity him more than +ever. His information is much extended, the _great_ qualities of +his mind heightened and better disciplined, but alas! his health is +much weaker, and his great failing, procrastination, or the +incapability of acting agreeably to his wish and will, much +increased." + +Whether the promised visit to Ottery St. Mary was ever paid there is +no record to show, but at the end of July 1807 we again hear of the +Coleridges at the house of a Mr. Chubb, a descendant of the Deist, at +Bridgewater; and here it was that De Quincey, after having endeavoured +in vain to run the poet to earth at Stowey, where he had been staying +with Mr. Poole, and whence he had gone to pay a short visit to Lord +Egmont, succeeded in obtaining an introduction to him. The +characteristic passage in which the younger man describes their +first meeting is too long for quotation, and it is to be hoped too well +known to need it: his vivid and acute criticism of Coleridge's +conversation may be more appropriately cited hereafter. His evidence as +to the conjugal relations of Coleridge and his wife has been already +discussed; and the last remaining point of interest about this +memorable introduction is the testimony which it incidentally affords +to De Quincey's genuine and generous instinct of hero-worship, and to +the depth of Coleridge's pecuniary embarrassments. The loan of £300, +which the poet's enthusiastic admirer insisted on Cottle's conveying to +him as from an unknown "young man of fortune who admired his talents," +should cover a multitude of De Quincey's subsequent sins. It was indeed +only upon Cottle's urgent representation that he had consented to +reduce the sum from £500 to £300. Nor does there seem any doubt of his +having honestly attempted to conceal his own identity with the nameless +benefactor, though, according to his own later account, he failed. +[1] + +This occurred in November 1807, and in the previous month De +Quincey had been able to render Coleridge a minor service, while at the +same moment gratifying a long cherished wish of his own. Mrs. Coleridge +was about to return with her children to Keswick, but her husband, not +yet master of this £300 windfall, and undoubtedly at his wits' end for +money, was arranging for a course of lectures to be delivered at the +Royal Institution early in the ensuing year, and could not accompany +them. De Quincey offered accordingly to be their escort, and duly +conducted them to Wordsworth's house, thus making the acquaintance of +the second of his two great poetical idols within a few months of +paying his first homage to the other. In February 1808 Coleridge again +took up his abode in London at his old free quarters in the +_Courier_ office, and began the delivery of a promised series of +sixteen lectures on Poetry and the Fine Arts. "I wish you could see +him," again writes Poole to Wedgwood, "you would pity and admire. He is +much improved, but has still less voluntary power than ever. Yet he is +so committed that I think he must deliver these lectures." Considering +that the authorities of the Royal Institution had agreed to pay him one +hundred guineas for delivering the lectures, he undoubtedly was more or +less "committed;" and his voluntary power, however small, might be +safely supposed to be equal to the task of fulfilling a contract. But +to get the lecturer into the lecture-room does not amount to much more +than bringing the horse to the water. You can no more make the one +drink than you can prevent the other from sending his audience away +thirsty. Coleridge's lectures on Poetry and the Fine Arts were +confused, ill arranged, and generally disappointing to the last degree. +Sometimes it was not even possible to bring the horse to the water. +Charles Lamb writes to Manning on the 20th of February 1808 (early days +indeed) that Coleridge had only delivered two lectures, and that though +"two more were intended, he did not come." De Quincey writes of +"dismissals of audience after audience, with pleas of illness; and on +many of his lecture-days I have seen all Albemarle Street closed by a +lock of carriages filled with women of distinction, until the servants +of the Institution or their own footmen advanced to the carriage-doors +with the intelligence that Mr. Coleridge had been suddenly taken ill." +Naturally there came a time when the "women of distinction" began to +tire of this treatment. "The plea, which at first had been received +with expressions of concern, repeated too often began to rouse disgust. +Many in anger, and some in real uncertainty whether it would not be +trouble thrown away, ceased to attend." And what De Quincey has to say +of the lectures themselves when they did by chance get delivered is no +less melancholy. "The lecturer's appearance," he says, "was generally +that of a man struggling with pain and over-mastering illness." + +"His lips were baked with feverish heat, and often black in colour; and +in spite of the water which he continued drinking through the whole +course of the lecture, he often seemed to labour under an almost paralytic +inability to raise the upper jaw from the lower" [_i.e._ I suppose +to move the lower jaw]. "In such a state it is clear that nothing could +save the lecture itself from reflecting his own feebleness and +exhaustion except the advantage of having been precomposed in some +happier mood. But that never happened: most unfortunately, he relied on +his extempore ability to carry him through. Now, had he been in +spirits, or had he gathered animation and kindled by his own emotion, +no written lecture could have been more effectual than one of his +unpremeditated colloquial harangues. But either he was depressed +originally below the point from which reascent was possible, or else +this reaction was intercepted by continual disgust from looking back +upon his own ill success; for assuredly he never once recovered that +free and eloquent movement of thought which he could command at any +time in a private company. The passages he read, moreover, in +illustrating his doctrines, were generally unhappily chosen, because +chosen at haphazard, from the difficulty of finding at a moment's +summons these passages which his purpose required. Nor do I remember +any that produced much effect except two or three which I myself put +ready marked into his hands among the _Metrical Romances_, edited +by Ritson. Generally speaking, the selections were as injudicious and +as inappropriate as they were ill delivered, for among Coleridge's +accomplishments good reading was not one. He had neither voice (so at +least I thought) nor management of voice. This defect is unfortunate in +a public lecturer, for it is inconceivable how much weight and +effectual pathos can be communicated by sonorous depth and melodious +cadence of the human voice to sentiments the most trivial; [2] nor, on +the other hand, how the grandest are emasculated by a style of reading +which fails in distributing the lights and shadows of a musical +intonation. However, this defect chiefly concerned the immediate +impression; the most afflicting to a friend of Coleridge's was the +entire absence of his own peculiar and majestic intellect; no heart, no +soul, was in anything he said; no strength of feeling in recalling +universal truths, no power of originality or compass of moral +relations in his novelties,--all was a poor, faint reflection from +pearls once scattered on the highway by himself in the prodigality of +his early opulence--a mendicant dependence on the alms dropped from his +own overflowing treasury of happier times." + +Severe as is this censure of the lectures, there is unhappily no good +ground for disputing its substantial justice. And the inferences which +it suggests are only too painfully plain. One can well understand +Coleridge's being an ineffective lecturer, and no failure in this +respect, however conspicuous, would necessarily force us to the +hypothesis of physical disability. But a Coleridge who could no more +compose a lecture than he could deliver one-a Coleridge who could +neither write nor extemporise anything specially remarkable on a +subject so congenial to him as that of English poetry--must +assuredly have spent most of his time, whether in the lecture-room or +out of it, in a state of incapacity for sustained intellectual effort. +De Quincey's humorous account of the lecturer's shiftless untidy life +at the Courier office, and even the Rabelaisian quip which Charles +Lamb throws at it in the above-quoted letter to Manning, are +sufficient indications of his state at this time. "Oh, Charles," +he writes to Lamb, early in February, just before the course of +lectures was to begin, "I am very, very ill. _Vixi._" The sad +truth is that, as seems to have been always the case with him when +living alone, he was during these months of his residence in London +more constantly and hopelessly under the dominion of opium than ever. + + +FOOTNOTES + +1. "In a letter written by him (Coleridge) about fifteen years after +that time, I found that he had become aware of all the circumstances, +perhaps through some indiscretion of Mr. Cottle's." Perhaps, however, +no very great indiscretion on Mr. Cottle's part was needed to enable +Coleridge to trace the loan to so ardent a young admirer and disciple. + +2. The justice of this criticism will be acknowledged by those many +persons whom Mr. Bright's great elocutionary skill has occasionally +deluded into imagining that the very commonplace verse which the famous +orator has been often known to quote with admiration is poetry of a +high order. + + + + +CHAPTER VII. + +Return to the Lakes--From Keswick to Grasmere--With Wordsworth at Allan +Bank--The _Friend_--Quits the Lake country for ever. + +[1809-1810.] + + +From the close of this series of lectures in the month of May 1808 +until the end of the year it is impossible to trace Coleridge's +movements or even to determine the nature of his occupation with any +approach to exactitude. The probability is, however, that he remained +in London at his lodgings in the _Courier_ office, and that he +supported himself by rendering assistance in various ways to Mr. Daniel +Stuart. We know nothing of him, however, with certainty until we find +him once more at the Lakes in the early part of the year 1809, but not +in his own home. Wordsworth had removed from his former abode at +Grasmere to Allan Bank, a larger house some three-quarters of a mile +distant, and there Coleridge took up his residence, more, it would +seem, as a permanent inmate of his friend's house than as a guest. The +specific cause of this migration from Greta Hall to Allan Bank does not +appear, but all the accessible evidence, contemporary and subsequent, +seems to point to the probability that it was the result of a definite +break-up of Coleridge's own home. He continued, at any rate, to reside +in Wordsworth's house during the whole seven months of his editorship +of the _Friend_, a new venture in periodical literature which he +undertook at this period; and we shall see that upon its failure he did +not resume his residence at Greta Hall, but quitted the Lake country at +once and for ever. + +We need not take too literally Coleridge's declaration in the _Biographia +Literaria_ that one "main object of his in starting the _Friend_ +was to establish the philosophical distinction between the Reason and +the Understanding." Had this been so, or at least had the periodical +been actually conducted in conformity with any such purpose, even the +chagrined projector himself could scarcely have had the face to +complain, as Coleridge did very bitterly, of the reception accorded to +it by the public. The most unpractical of thinkers can hardly have +imagined that the "general reader" would "take in" a weekly metaphysical +journal published at a town in Cumberland. The _Friend_ was not +quite so essentially hopeless an enterprise as that would have been; +but the accidents of mismanagement and imprudence soon made it, for +all practical purposes, sufficiently desperate. Even the forlorn +_Watchman_, which had been set on foot when Coleridge had fourteen +years' less experience of the world, was hardly more certainly +foredoomed. The first care of the founder of the _Friend_ was to +select, as the place of publication, a town exactly twenty-eight miles +from his own abode--a distance virtually trebled, as De Quincey +observes, "by the interposition of Kirkstone, a mountain only to be +scaled by a carriage ascent of three miles, and so steep in parts that +without four horses no solitary traveller can persuade the neighbouring +innkeepers to convey him." Here, however, at Penrith, "by way of +purchasing intolerable difficulties at the highest price," Coleridge was +advised and actually persuaded to set up a printer, to buy and lay in a +stock of paper, types, etc., instead of resorting to some printer already +established at a nearer place--as, for instance, Kendal, which was ten +miles nearer, and connected with Coleridge's then place of residence by +a daily post, whereas at Penrith there was no post at all. Having thus +studiously and severely handicapped himself, the projector of the new +periodical set to work, upon the strength of what seems to have been in +great measure a fancy list of subscribers, to print and, so far as his +extraordinary arrangements permitted, to circulate his journal. With +_naïve_ sententiousness he warns the readers of the _Biographia +Literaria_ against trusting, in their own case, to such a guarantee +as he supposed himself to possess. "You cannot," he observes, "be certain +that the names on a subscription list have been put down by sufficient +authority; or, should that be ascertained, it still remains to be known +whether they were not extorted by some over-zealous friend's +importunity; whether the subscriber had not yielded his name merely +from want of courage to say no! and with the intention of dropping the +work as soon as possible." Thus out of a hundred patrons who had been +obtained for the _Friend_ by an energetic canvasser, "ninety threw +up the publication before the fourth number without any notice, though +it was well known to them that in consequence of the distance and the +slowness and irregularity of the conveyance" [it is amusing to observe +the way in which Coleridge notes these drawbacks of his own creation as +though they were "the act of God"] "I was compelled to lay in a stock +of stamped paper for at least eight weeks beforehand, each sheet of +which stood me in fivepence previous to its arrival at my printer's; +though the subscription money was not to be received till the twenty- +first week after the commencement of the work; and, lastly, though it +was in nine cases out of ten impracticable for me to receive the money +for two or three numbers without paying an equal sum for the postage." + +Enough appears in this undesignedly droll account of the +venture to show pretty clearly that, even had the _Friend_ +obtained a reasonable measure of popularity at starting, the flagrant +defects in the methods of distributing and financing it must have +insured its early decease. But, as a matter of fact, it had no chance +of popularity from the outset. Its first number appeared on 1st August +1809, and Coleridge, writing to Southey on 20th October of the same +year, speaks of his "original apprehension" that the plan and execution +of the _Friend_ is so utterly unsuitable to the public taste as to +preclude all rational hopes of its success. "Much," he continues, +"might have been done to have made the former numbers less so, by the +interposition of others written more expressly for general interest;" +and he promises to do his best in future to "interpose tales and whole +numbers of amusement, which will make the periods lighter and shorter." +Meanwhile he begs Southey to write a letter to the _Friend_ in a +lively style, rallying its editor on "his Quixotism in expecting that +the public will ever pretend to understand his lucubrations or feel any +interest in subjects of such sad and unkempt antiquity." Southey, ever +good-natured, complied, even amid the unceasing press of his work, with +the request; and to the letter of lightly-touched satire which he +contributed to the journal he added a few private lines of friendly +counsel, strongly urging Coleridge to give two or three amusing +numbers, and he would hear of admiration on every side. "Insert too," +he suggested, "a few more poems--any that you have, except _Christabel_, +for that is of too much value. And write _now_ that character of +Bonaparte, announced in former times for 'to-morrow, and to-morrow, +and to-morrow.'" It was too late, however, for good advice to be of +any avail: the _Friend_ was past praying for. It lingered on +till its twenty-eighth number, and expired, unlike the Watchman, +without any farewell to its friends, in the third week of March 1810. + +The republication of this periodical, or rather selections +from it, which appeared in 1818, is hardly perhaps described with +justice in De Quincey's words as "altogether and absolutely a new +work." A reader can, at any rate, form a pretty fair estimate from it +of the style and probable public attractions of the original issue; and +a perusal of it, considered in its character as a bid for the patronage +of the general reader, is certainly calculated to excite an +astonishment too deep for words. We have, of course, to bear in mind +that the standard of the readable in our grandfathers' days was a more +liberal and tolerant one than it is in our own. In those days of +leisurely communications and slowly moving events there was relatively +at least a far larger public for a weekly issue of moral and +philosophical essays, under the name of a periodical, than it would be +found easy to secure at present, when even a monthly discourse upon +things in general requires Mr. Euskin's brilliancy of eloquence, +vivacity of humour, and perpetual charm of unexpectedness to carry it +off. Still the _Spectator_ continued to be read in Coleridge's +day, and people therefore must have had before them a perpetual example +of what it was possible to do in the way of combining entertainment +with instruction. How, then, it could have entered into the mind of the +most sanguine projector to suppose that the _longueurs_ and the +difficulty of the _Friend_ would be patiently borne with for the +sake of the solid nutriment which it contained it is quite impossible +to understand. Even supposing that a weekly, whose avowed object was +"to aid in the formation of fixed principles in politics, morals, and +religion," could possibly be floated, even "with literary amusements +interspersed," it is evident that very much would depend upon the +character of these "amusements" themselves. In the republication of +1817 they appear under the heading of "landing-places." One of them +consists of a parallel between Voltaire and Erasmus, and between +Rousseau and Luther, founded, of course, on the respective attitudes of +the two pairs of personages to the Revolution and the Reformation. +Another at the end of the series consists of a criticism of, and +panegyric on, Sir Alexander Ball, the governor of Malta. Such are the +landing-places. But how should any reader, wearied with "for ever +climbing up the climbing wave" of Coleridge's eloquence, have found +rest or refreshment on one of these uncomfortable little sandbanks? It +was true that the original issue of the _Friend_ contained +poetical contributions which do not appear in the republication; but +poetry in itself, or, at any rate, good poetry, is not a relief to the +overstrained faculties, and, even if it were, the relief would have +been provided at too infrequent intervals to affect the general result. +The fact is, however, that Coleridge's own theory of his duty as a +public instructor was in itself fatal to any hope of his venture +proving a commercial success. Even when entreated by Southey to lighten +the character of the periodical, he accompanies his admission of the +worldly wisdom of the advice with something like a protest against such +a departure from the severity of his original plan. His object, as he +puts it with much cogency from his own unpractical point of view--his +object being to teach men how to think on politics, religion, and +morals, and thinking being a very arduous and distasteful business to +the mass of mankind, it followed that the essays of the _Friend_ +(and particularly the earlier essays, in which the reader required to +be "grounded" in his subject) could hardly be agreeable reading. With +perfect frankness indeed does he admit in his prospectus that he must +"submit to be thought dull by those who seek amusement only." He hoped, +however, as he says in one of his earlier essays, to become livelier as +he went on. "The proper merit of a foundation is its massiveness and +solidity. The conveniences and ornaments, the gilding and stucco-work, +the sunshine and sunny prospects, will come with the superstructure." +But the building, alas! was never destined to be completed, and the +architect had his own misgivings about the attractions even of the +completed edifice. "I dare not flatter myself that any endeavours of +mine, compatible with the duty I owe to the truth and the hope of +permanent utility, will render the _Friend_ agreeable to the +majority of what is called the reading public. I never expected it. How +indeed could I when, etc." Yet, in spite of these professions, it is +clear from the prospectus that Coleridge believed in the possibility of +obtaining a public for the _Friend_. He says that "a motive for +honourable ambition was supplied by the fact that every periodical +paper of the kind now attempted, which had been conducted with zeal and +ability, was not only well received at the time, but has become +popular;" and he seems to regard it as a comparatively unimportant +circumstance that the _Friend_ would be distinguished from "its +celebrated predecessors, the _Spectator_ and the like," by the +"greater length of the separate essays, by their closer connection with +each other, and by the predominance of one object, and the common +bearing of all to one end." It was, of course, exactly this _plus_ +of prolixity and _minus_ of variety which lowered the sum of the +_Friend's_ attractions so far below that of the _Spectator_ +as to deprive the success of Addison of all its value as a +precedent. + +Nor is it easy to agree with the editor of the reprint of +1837 that the work, "with all its imperfections, is perhaps the most +vigorous" of its author's compositions. That there are passages in it +which impress us by their force of expression, as well as by subtlety +or beauty of thought, must of course be admitted. It was impossible to +a man of Coleridge's literary power that it should be otherwise. But +"vigorous" is certainly not the adjective which seems to me to suggest +itself to an impartial critic of these too copious disquisitions. +Making every allowance for their necessary elasticity of scope as being +designed to "prepare and discipline the student's moral and +intellectual being, not to propound dogmas and theories for his +adoption," it must, I think, be allowed that they are wanting in that +continuity of movement and co-ordination of parts which, as it seems to +me, enters into any intelligible definition of "vigour," as attributed +to a work of moral and political exposition considered as a whole. The +writer's discursiveness is too often and too vexatiously felt by the +reader to permit of the survival of any sense of theorematic unity in +his mind; he soon gives up all attempts at periodical measurement of +his own and his author's progress towards the prescribed goal of their +journey; and he resigns himself in this, as in so many other of +Coleridge's prose works, to a study of isolated and detached passages. +So treated, however, one may freely admit that the _Friend_ is +fully worthy of the admiration with which Mr. H. N. Coleridge regarded +it. If not the most vigorous, it is beyond all comparison the most +characteristic of all his uncle's performances in this field of his +multiform activity. In no way could the peculiar pregnancy of +Coleridge's thoughts, the more than scholastic subtlety of his +dialectic, and the passionate fervour of his spirituality be more +impressively exhibited than by a well-made selection of _loci_ +from the pages of the _Friend_. + + + + +CHAPTER VIII. + +London again--Second recourse to journalism--The _Courier_ +articles--The Shakespeare lectures--Production of _Remorse_--At +Bristol again as lecturer--Residence at Calne--Increasing ill health +and embarrassment--Retirement to Mr. Gillman's. + +[1810-1816.] + + +The life led by Coleridge during the six years next ensuing is +difficult to trace, even in the barest outline; to give a detailed and +circumstantial account of it from any ordinarily accessible source of +information is impossible. Nor is it, I imagine, very probable that +even the most exhaustive search among whatever imprinted records may +exist in the possession of his friends would at all completely supply +the present lack of biographical material. For not only had it become +Coleridge's habit to disappear from the sight of his kinsmen and +acquaintances for long periods together; he had fallen almost wholly +silent also. They not only ceased to see him, but they ceased to hear +of him. Letters addressed to him, even on subjects of the greatest +importance, would remain for months unnoticed, and in many instances +would receive no answer at all. His correspondence during the next +half-dozen years must have been of the scantiest amount and the most +intermittent character, and a biographer could hope, therefore, for +but little aid in bridging over the large gaps in his knowledge of +this period, even if every extant letter written by Coleridge during +its continuance were to be given to the world. + +Such light, too, as is retrospectively thrown upon it by Coleridge's +correspondence of a later date is of the most fitful description,-- +scarcely more than serves, in fact, for the rendering of darkness +visible. Even the sudden and final departure from the Lakes it leaves +involved in as much obscurity as ever. Writing to Mr. Thomas Allsop +[1] from Ramsgate twelve years afterwards (8th October 1822) he says +that he "counts four grasping and griping sorrows in his past life." +The first of these "was when" [no date given] "the vision of a happy +home sank for ever, and it became impossible for me longer even to +hope for domestic happiness under the name of husband." That is plain +enough on the whole, though it still leaves us in some uncertainty as +to whether the "sinking of the vision" was as gradual as the +estrangement between husband and wife, or whether he refers to some +violent rupture of relations with Mrs. Coleridge, possibly +precipitating his departure from the Lakes. If soothe second "griping +and grasping sorrow" followed very quickly on the first, for he says +that it overtook him "on the night of his arrival from Grasmere with +Mr. and Mrs. Montagu;" while in the same breath and paragraph, and as +though undoubtedly referring to the same thing, he speaks of the +"destruction of a friendship of fifteen years when, just at the moment +of Tenner and Curtis's (the publishers) bankruptcy" (by which +Coleridge was a heavy loser, but which did not occur till seven years +afterwards), somebody indicated by seven asterisks and possessing an +income of £1200 a-year, was "totally transformed into baseness." There +is certainly not much light here, any more than in the equally +enigmatical description of the third sorrow as being "in some sort +included in the second," so that "what the former was to friendship +the latter was to a still more inward bond." The truth is, that all +Coleridge's references to himself in his later years are shrouded in a +double obscurity. One veil is thrown over them by his deliberate +preference for abstract and mystical forms of expression, and another +perhaps by that kind of shameful secretiveness which grows upon all +men who become the slaves of concealed indulgences, and which often +displays itself on occasions when it has no real object to gain of any +kind whatever. + +Thus much only we know, that on reaching London in the summer of 1810 +Coleridge became the guest of the Montagus, and that, after some +months' residence with them, he left as the immediate result of some +difference with his host which was never afterwards composed. Whether +it arose from the somewhat trivial cause to which De Quincey has, +admittedly upon the evidence of "the learned in literary scandal," +referred it, it is now impossible to say. But at some time or other, +towards the close probably of 1810, or in the early months of 1811, +Coleridge quitted Mr. Montagu's house for that of Mr. John Morgan, a +companion of his early Bristol days, and a common friend of his and +Southey's; and here, at No. 7 Portland Place, Hammersmith, he was +residing when, for the second time, he resolved to present himself to +the London public in the capacity of lecturer. His services were on +this occasion engaged by the London Philosophical Society, at Crane +Court, Fleet Street, and their prospectus announced that on Monday, +18th November, Mr. Coleridge would commence "a course of lectures on +Shakspeare and Milton, in illustration of the principles of poetry and +their application, on grounds of criticism, to the most popular works +of later English poets, those of the living included. After an +introductory lecture on false criticism (especially in poetry) and on +its causes, two-thirds of the remaining course," continues the +prospectus, "will be assigned, 1st, to a philosophical analysis and +explanation of all the principal characters of our great dramatists, +as Othello, Falstaff, Richard the Third, Lago, Hamlet, etc., and to a +critical comparison of Shakspeare in respect of diction, imagery, +management of the passions, judgment in the construction of his +dramas--in short, of all that belongs to him as a poet, and as a +dramatic poet, with his contemporaries or immediate successors, +Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Ford, Massinger, and in the endeavour +to determine which of Shakespeare's merits and defects are common to +him, with other writers of the same age, and what remain peculiar to +his genius." + +A couple of months before the commencement of this course, viz. in +September 1811, Coleridge seems to have entered into a definite +journalistic engagement with his old editor, Mr. Daniel Stuart, then +the proprietor of the _Courier_. It was not, however, his first +connection with that journal. He had already published at least one +piece of verse in its columns, and two years before, while the +_Friend_ was still in existence, he had contributed to it a +series of letters on the struggle of the Spaniards against their +French invaders. In these, as though to show that under the ashes of +his old democratic enthusiasm still lived its wonted fires, and that +the inspiration of a popular cause was only needed to reanimate them, +we find, with less of the youthful lightness of touch and agility of +movement, a very near approach to the vigour of his early journalistic +days. Whatever may be thought of the historic value of the parallel +which he institutes between the struggle of the Low Countries against +their tyrant, and that of the Peninsula against its usurping +conqueror, it is worked out with remarkable ingenuity of completeness. +Whole pages of the letters are radiant with that steady flame of +hatred which, ever since the hour of his disillusionment, had glowed +in his breast at the name and thought of Bonaparte; and whenever he +speaks of the Spaniards, of Spanish patriotism, of the Spanish Cortes, +we see that the names of "the people," of "freedom," of "popular +assembly," have some of their old magic for him still. The following +passage is almost pathetic in its reminder of the days of 1792, before +that modern Leonidas, the young French Republic, had degenerated into +the Xerxes of the Empire. + +"The power which raised up, established, and enriched the Dutch +republic,--the same mighty power is no less at work in the present +struggle of the Spanish nation, a power which mocks the calculations +of ordinary statecraft too subtle to be weighed against it, and mere +outward brute force too different from it to admit of comparison. A +power as mighty in the rational creation as the element of electricity +in the material world; and, like that element, infinite in its +affinities, infinite in its mode of action, combining the most +discordant natures, fixing the most volatile, and arming the sluggish +vapour of the marsh with arrows of fire; working alike in silence and +in tempest, in growth and in destruction; now contracted to an +individual soul, and now, as in a moment, dilating itself over a whole +nation! Am I asked what this mighty power may be, and wherein it +exists? If we are worthy of the fame which we possess as the +countrymen of Hampden, Russell, and Algernon Sidney, we shall find the +answer in our own hearts. It is the power of the insulted free-will, +steadied by the approving conscience and struggling against brute +force and iniquitous compulsion for the common rights of human nature, +brought home to our inmost souls by being, at the same time, the +rights of our betrayed, insulted, and bleeding country." + +And as this passage recalls the most striking characteristics of his +earlier style, so may its conclusion serve as a fair specimen of the +calmer eloquence of his later manner:-- + +"It is a painful truth, sir, that these men who appeal most to facts, +and pretend to take them for their exclusive guide, are the very +persons who most disregard the light of experience when it refers them +to the mightiness of their own inner nature, in opposition to those +forces which they can see with their eyes, and reduce to figures upon +a slate. And yet, sir, what is history for the greater and more useful +part but a voice from the sepulchres of our forefathers, assuring us, +from their united experience, that our spirits are as much stronger +than our bodies as they are nobler and more permanent? The historic +muse appears in her loftiest character as the nurse of Hope. It is her +appropriate praise that her records enable the magnanimous to silence +the selfish and cowardly by appealing to actual events for the +information of these truths which they themselves first learned from +the surer oracle of their own reason." + +But this reanimation of energy was but a transient phenomenoa It did +not survive the first freshness of its exciting cause. The Spanish +insurrection grew into the Peninsular war, and though the glorious +series of Wellington's victories might well, one would think, have +sustained the rhetorical temperature at its proper pitch, it failed to +do so. Or was it, as the facts appear now and then to suggest, that +Coleridge at Grasmere or Keswick-Coleridge in the inspiring (and +restraining) companionship of close friends and literary compeers--was +an altogether different man from Coleridge in London, alone with his +thoughts and his opium? The question cannot be answered with +confidence, and the fine quality of the lectures on Shakespeare is +sufficient to show that, for some time, at any rate, after his final +migration to London, his critical faculty retained its full vigour. +But it is beyond dispute that his regular contributions to the +_Courier_ in 1811-12 are not only vastly inferior to his articles +of a dozen years before in the _Morning Post_ but fall sensibly +short of the level of the letters of 1809, from which extract has just +been made. Their tone is spiritless, and they even lack distinction of +style. Their very subjects, and the mode of treating them, appear to +show a change in Coleridge's attitude towards public affairs if not in +the very conditions of his journalistic employment. They have much +more of the character of newspaper hack-work than his earlier +contributions. He seems to have been, in many instances, set to write +a mere report, and often a rather dry and mechanical report of this or +the other Peninsular victory. He seldom or never discusses the +political situation, as his wont had been, _au large_; and in +place of broad statesmanlike reflection on the scenes and actors in +the great world-drama then in progress, we meet with too much of that +sort of criticism on the consistency and capacity of "our +contemporary, the _Morning Chronicle_," which had less attraction, +it may be suspected, even for the public of its own day than +for the journalistic profession, while for posterity, of course, +it possesses no interest at all. The series of contributions extends +from September of 1811 until April of the following year, and appears +to have nearly come to a premature and abrupt close in the +intermediate July, when an article written by Coleridge in strong +opposition to the proposed reinstatement of the Duke of York in the +command-in-chief was, by ministerial influence, suppressed before +publication. This made Coleridge, as his daughter informs us on the +authority of Mr. Crabb Kobinson, "very uncomfortable," and he was +desirous of being engaged on another paper. He wished to be connected +with the _Times_, and "I spoke," says Mr. Eobinson, "with Walter +on the subject, but the negotiation failed." + +With the conclusion of the lectures on Shakespeare, and the loss of +the stimulus, slight as it then was to him, of regular duties and +recurring engagements, Coleridge seems to have relapsed once more into +thoroughly desultory habits of work. The series of aphorisms and +reflections which he contributed in 1812 to Southey's _Omniana_, +witty, suggestive, profound as many of them are, must not of course be +referred to the years in which they were given to the world. They +belong unquestionably to the order of _marginalia_, the scattered +notes of which De Quincey speaks with not extravagant admiration, and +which, under the busy pencil of a commentator always indefatigable in +the _strenua inertia_ of reading, had no doubt accumulated in +considerable quantities over a long course of years. + +The disposal, however, of this species of literary material could +scarcely have been a source of much profit to him, and Coleridge's +difficulties of living must by this time have been growing acute. His +pension from the Wedgwoods had been assigned, his surviving son has +stated, to the use of his family, and even this had been in the +previous year reduced by half. "In Coleridge's neglect," observes Miss +Meteyard, "of his duties to his wife, his children, and his friends, +must be sought the motives which led Mr. Wedgwood in 1811 to withdraw +his share of the annuity. An excellent, even over-anxious father, he +was likely to be shocked at a neglect which imposed on the generosity +of Southey, himself heavily burdened, those duties which every man of +feeling and honour proudly and even jealously guards as his own.... +The pension of £150 per annum had been originally granted with the +view to secure Coleridge independence and leisure while he effected +some few of his manifold projects of literary work. But ten years had +passed, and these projects were still _in nubibus_--even the life +of Leasing, even the briefer memoir of Thomas Wedgwood; and gifts so +well intentioned, had as it were, ministered to evil rather than to +good." We can hardly wonder at the step, however we may regret it; and +if one of the reasons adduced in defence of it savours somewhat of the +fallacy known as _... non causÆ’, pro causÆ’_, we may perhaps +attribute that rather to the maladroitness of Miss Meteyard's advocacy +than to the weakness of Mr. Wedgwood's logic. The fact, however, that +this "excellent, even over-anxious father" was shocked at a neglect +which imposed a burden on the generosity of Southey, is hardly a just +ground for cutting off one of the supplies by which that burden was +partially relieved. As to the assignment of the pension to the family, +it is impossible to question what has been positively affirmed by an +actual member of that family, the Rev. Derwent Coleridge himself; +though, when he adds that not only was the school education of both the +sons provided from this source, but that through his (Coleridge's) +influence they were both sent to college, his statement is at variance, +as will be presently seen, with an authority equal to his own. + +In 1812, at any rate, we may well believe that Coleridge's necessities +had become pressing, and the timely service then rendered to him by +Lord Byron may have been suggested almost as much by a knowledge of +his needs as by admiration for the dramatic merits of his long-since +rejected tragedy. _Osorio's_ time had at any rate come. The +would-be fratricide changed his name to Ordonio, and ceased to stand +sponsor to the play, which was rechristened _Remorse_, and +accepted at last, upon Byron's recommendation, by the committee of +Drury Lane Theatre, the playhouse at whose doors it had knocked vainly +fifteen years before it was performed there for the first time on the +23d of January 1813. The prologue and epilogue, without which in those +times no gentleman's drama was accounted complete, was written, the +former by Charles Lamb, the latter by the author himself. It obtained +a brilliant success on its first representation, and was honoured with +what was in those days regarded as the very respectable run of twenty +nights. + +The success, however, which came so opportunely for his material +necessities was too late to produce any good effect upon Coleridge's +mental state. But a month after the production of his tragedy we find +him writing in the most dismal strain of hypochondria to Thomas Poole. +The only pleasurable sensation which the success of _Remorse_ had +given him was, he declares, the receipt of his friend's "heart- +engendered lines" of congratulation. "No grocer's apprentice, after +his first month's permitted riot, was ever sicker of figs and raisins +than I of hearing about the _Remorse_. The endless rat-a-tat-tat +at our black-and-blue bruised doors, and my three master-fiends, +proof-sheets, letters, and--worse than these--invitations to large +dinners, which I cannot refuse without offence and imputation of +pride, etc., oppress me so much that my spirits quite sink under it. I +have never seen the play since the first night. It has been a good +thing for the theatre. They will get eight or ten thousand pounds by +it, and I shall get more than by all my literary labours put together +--nay, thrice as much." So large a sum of money as this must have +amounted to should surely have lasted him for years; but the +particular species of intemperance to which he was now hopelessly +enslaved is probably the most costly of all forms of such indulgence, +and it seems pretty evident that the proceeds of his theatrical +_coup_ were consumed in little more than a year. + +Early in 1814, at any rate, Coleridge once more returned to his old +occupation of lecturer, and this time not in London, but in the scene +of his first appearance in that capacity. The lectures which he +proposed to deliver at Bristol were, in fact, a repetition of the +course of 1811-12; but the ways of the lecturer, to judge from an +amusing story recorded by Cottle, more nearly resembled his +proceedings in 1808. A "brother of Mr. George Cumberland," who +happened to be his fellow-traveller to Bristol on this occasion, +relates that before the coach started Coleridge's attention was +attracted by a little Jew boy selling pencils, with whom he entered +into conversation, and with whose superior qualities he was so +impressed as to declare that "if he had not an important engagement at +Bristol he would stay behind to provide some better condition for the +lad." The coach having started, "the gentleman" (for his name was +unknown to the narrator of the incident) "talked incessantly and in a +most entertaining way for thirty miles out of London, and, afterwards, +with little intermission till they reached Marlborough," when he +discovered that a lady in the coach with him was a particular friend +of his; and on arriving at Bath he quitted the coach declaring that he +was determined not to leave her till he had seen her safe to her +brother's door in North Wales. This was the day fixed for the delivery +of Coleridge's first lecture. Two or three days afterwards, having +completed his _détour_ by North Wales, he arrived at Bristol: +another day was fixed for the commencement of the course, and +Coleridge then presented himself an hour after the audience had taken +their seats. The "important engagement" might be broken, it seems, for +a mere whim, though not for a charitable impulse--a distinction +testifying to a mixture of insincerity and unpunctuality not pleasant +to note as an evidence of the then state of Coleridge's emotions and +will. + +Thus inauspiciously commenced, there was no reason why the Bristol +lectures of 1814 should be more successful than the London Institution +lectures of 1808; nor were they, it appears, in fact. They are said to +have been "sparsely attended,"--no doubt owing to the natural +unwillingness of people to pay for an hour's contemplation of an empty +platform; and their pecuniary returns in consequence were probably +insignificant. Coleridge remained in Bristol till the month of August, +when he returned to London. + +The painful task of tracing his downward course is now almost +completed. In the middle of this year he touched the lowest point of +his descent. Cottle, who had a good deal of intercourse with him by +speech and letter in 1814, and who had not seen him since 1807, was +shocked by his extreme prostration, and then for the first time +ascertained the cause. "In 1814," he says in his _Recollections_, +"S. T. C. had been long, very long, in the habit of taking from two +quarts of laudanum a week to a pint a day, and on one occasion he had +been known to take in the twenty-four hours a whole quart of laudanum. +The serious expenditure of money resulting from this habit was the +least evil, though very great, and must have absorbed all the produce +of his writings and lectures and the liberalities of his friends." +Cottle addressed to him a letter of not very delicate remonstrance on +the subject, to which Coleridge replied in his wontedly humble strain. + +There is a certain Pharisaism about the Bristol poet-publisher which +renders it necessary to exercise some little caution in the acceptance +of his account of Coleridge's condition; but the facts, from whatever +source one seeks them, appear to acquit him of any exaggeration in his +summing up of the melancholy matter. "A general impression," he says, +"prevailed on the minds of Coleridge's friends that it was a desperate +case, that paralysed all their efforts; that to assist Coleridge with +money which, under favourable circumstances would have been most +promptly advanced, would now only enlarge his capacity to obtain the +opium which was consuming him. We merely knew that Coleridge had +retired with his friend, Mr. John Morgan, to a small house at Calne in +Wiltshire." + +It must have been at Calne, then, that Coleridge composed the series +of "Letters to Mr. Justice Fletcher concerning his charge to the Grand +Jury of the county of Wexford, at the summer Assizes in 1814," which +appeared at intervals in the _Courier_ between 20th September and +10th December of this year. Their subject, a somewhat injudiciously +animated address to the aforesaid Grand Jury on the subject of the +relations between Catholicism and Protestantism in Ireland, was well +calculated to stimulate the literary activity of a man who always took +something of the keen interest of the modern Radical in the eternal +Irish question; and the letters are not wanting either in +argumentative force or in grave impressiveness of style. But their lack +of spring and energy as compared with Coleridge's earlier work in +journalism is painfully visible throughout. + +Calne, it is to be supposed, was still Coleridge's place of abode when +Southey (17th October) wrote Cottle that letter which appears in his +_Correspondence_, and which illustrates with such sad completeness +the contrast between the careers of the two generous, romantic, +brilliant youths who had wooed their wives together--and between the +fates, one must add, of the two sisters who had listened to their +wooing--eighteen years before: a letter as honourable to the writer as +it is the reverse to its subject. "Can you," asks Southey, "tell me +anything of Coleridge? A few lines of introduction for a son of Mr.---- +of St. James's, in your city, are all that we have received from him +since I saw him last September twelvemonth (1813) in town. The children +being thus left entirely to chance, I have applied to his brothers at +Ottey (Ottery?) concerning them, and am in hopes through their means +and the assistance of other friends of sending Hartley to college. +Lady Beaumont has promised £30 a year for the purpose, and Poole £10. +I wrote to Coleridge three or four months ago, telling him that unless +he took some steps in providing for this object I must make the +application, and required his answer within a given term of three +weeks. He received the letter, and in his note by Mr.----promised to +answer it, but he has never taken any further notice of it. I have +acted with the advice of Wordsworth. The brothers, as I expected, +promise their concurrence, and I daily expect a letter stating to what +extent they will contribute." With this letter before him an impartial +biographer can hardly be expected to adopt the theory which has +commended itself to the filial piety of the Rev. Derwent Coleridge-- +namely, that it was through the father's "influence" that the sons +were sent to college. On a plain matter of fact such as this, one may +be permitted, without indelicacy, to uphold the conclusions compelled +by the evidence. Such expressions of opinion, on the other hand, as +that Coleridge's "separation from his family, brought about and +continued through the force of circumstances over which he had far +less control than has been commonly supposed, was in fact nothing else +but an ever-prolonged absence;" and that "from first to last he took +an affectionate, it may be said a passionate, interest in the welfare +of his children"--such expressions of mere opinion as these it may be +proper enough to pass by in respectful silence. + +The following year brought with it no improvement in the embarrassed +circumstances, no reform of the disordered life. Still domiciled with +Mr. Morgan at Calne, the self-made sufferer writes to Cottle: "You +will wish to know something of myself. In health I am not worse than +when at Bristol I was best; yet fluctuating, yet unhappy, in +circumstances poor indeed! I have collected my scattered and my +manuscript poems sufficient to make one volume. Enough I have to make +another. But, till the latter is finished, I cannot, without great loss +of character, publish the former, on account of the arrangement, +besides the necessity of correction. For instance, I earnestly wish to +begin the volumes with what has never been seen by any, however few, +such as a series of odes on the different sentences of the Lord's +Prayer, and, more than all this, to finish my greater work on +'Christianity considered as philosophy, and as the only philosophy.'" +Then follows a request for a loan of forty pounds on the security of +the MSS., an advance which Cottle declined to make, though he sent +Coleridge "some smaller temporary relief." The letter concludes with a +reference to a project for taking a house and receiving pupils to +hoard and instruct, which Cottle appeared to consider the crowning +"degradation and ignominy of all." + +A few days later we find Lord Byron again coming to Coleridge's +assistance with a loan of a hundred pounds and words of counsel and +encouragement. Why should not the author of Remorse repeat his success +I "In Kean," writes Byron, "there is an actor worthy of expressing the +thoughts of the character which you have every power of embodying, and +I cannot but regret that the part of Ordonio was disposed of before +his appearance at Drury Lane. We have had nothing to be mentioned in +the same breath with Remorse for very many years, and I should think +that the reception of that play was sufficient to encourage the +highest hopes of author and audience." The advice was followed, and +the drama of Zapolya was the result. It is a work of even less dramatic +strength than its predecessor, and could scarcely, one thinks, have +been as successful with an audience. It was not, however, destined to +see the footlights. Before it had passed the tribunal of the Drury +Lane Committee it had lost the benefit of Byron's patronage through +the poet's departure from England, and the play was rejected by Mr. +Douglas Kinnaird, the then reader for the theatre, who assigned, +according to Mr. Gillman, "some ludicrous objections to the +metaphysics." Before leaving England, however, Byron rendered a last, +and, as the result proved, a not unimportant service to his brother- +poet. He introduced him to Mr. Murray, who, in the following year, +undertook the publication of _Christabel_--the most successful, +in the sense of the most popular, of all its author's productions in +verse. + +With the coming of spring in the following year that dreary story of +slow self-destruction, into which the narrative of Coleridge's life +from the age of thirty to that of forty-five resolves itself, was +brought to a close. Coleridge had at last perceived that his only hope +of redemption lay in a voluntary submission of his enfeebled will to +the control of others, and he had apparently just enough strength of +volition to form and execute the necessary resolve. He appears, in the +first instance, to have consulted a physician of the name of Adams, +who, on the 9th of April 1816, put himself in communication with Mr. +Gillman of Highgate. "A very learned, but in one respect an +unfortunate gentleman, has," he wrote, "applied to me on a singular +occasion. He has for several years been in the habit of taking large +quantities of opium. For some time past he has been in vain +endeavouring to break himself of it. It is apprehended his friends are +not firm enough, from a dread lest he should suffer by suddenly +leaving it off, though he is conscious of the contrary, and has +proposed to me to submit himself to any regimen, however severe. With +this view he wishes to fix himself in the house of some medical +gentleman who will have the courage to refuse him any laudanum, and +under whose assistance, should he be the worse for it, he may be +relieved." Would such a proposal, inquires the writer, be absolutely +inconsistent with Mr. Gillman's family arrangements? He would not, he +adds, have proposed it "but on account of the great importance of the +character as a literary man. His communicative temper will make his +society very interesting as well as useful." Mr. Gillman's +acquaintance with Dr. Adams was but slight, and he had had no previous +intention of receiving an inmate into his house. But the case very +naturally interested him; he sought an interview with Dr. Adams, and it +was agreed that the latter should drive Coleridge to Highgate the +following evening. At the appointed hour, however, Coleridge presented +himself alone, and, after spending the evening at Mr. Gillman's, left +him, as even in his then condition he left most people who met him for +the first time, completely captivated by the amiability of his manners +and the charm of his conversation. The next day Mr. Gillman received +from him a letter, finally settling the arrangement to place himself +under the doctor's care, and concluding with the following pathetic +passage: + +"And now of myself. My ever wakeful reason and the keenness of my +moral feelings will secure you from all unpleasant circumstances +connected with me save only one, viz. the evasion of a specific +madness. You will never hear anything but truth from me; prior habits +render it out of my power to tell an untruth, but, unless carefully +observed, I dare not promise that I should not, with regard to this +detested poison, be capable of acting one. Not sixty hours have yet +passed without my having taken laudanum, though, for the last week, +comparatively trifling doses. I have full belief that your anxiety +need not be extended beyond the first week, and for the first week, I +shall not, must not, be permitted to leave your house, unless with +you; delicately or indelicately, this must be done, and both the +servants, and the assistant, must receive absolute commands from you. +The stimulus of conversation suspends the terror that haunts my mind; +but, when I am alone, the horrors I have suffered from laudanum, the +degradation, the blighted utility, almost overwhelm me. If (as I feel +for the _first time_ a soothing confidence that it will prove) I +should leave you restored to my moral and bodily health, it is not +myself only that will love and honour you; every friend I have (and, +thank God! in spite of this wretched vice I have many and warm ones, +who were friends of my youth, and have never deserted me) will thank +you with reverence. I have taken no notice of your kind apologies. If +I could not be comfortable in your house and with your family, I +should deserve to be miserable." + +This letter was written on a Saturday, and on the following Monday +Coleridge presented himself at Mr. Gillman's, bringing in his hand the +proof--sheets of _Christabel_, now printed for the first time. He +had looked, as the letter just quoted shows, with a "soothing +confidence" to leaving his retreat at some future period in a restored +condition of moral and bodily health; and as regards the restoration, +his confidence was in a great measure justified. But the friendly doors +which opened to receive him on this 15th of April 1816, were destined +to close only upon his departing bier. Under the watchful and almost +reverential care of this well-chosen guardian, sixteen years of +comparatively quiet and well-ordered life, of moderate but effective +literary activity, and of gradual though never complete emancipation +from his fatal habit, were reserved to him. He had still, as we shall +see, to undergo certain recurrences of restlessness and renewals of +pecuniary difficulty; his shattered health was but imperfectly and +temporarily repaired; his "shaping spirit of imagination" could not and +did not return; his transcendental broodings became more and more the +"habit of his soul." But henceforth he recovers for us a certain +measure of his long-lost dignity, and a figure which should always +have been "meet for the reverence of the hearth" in the great +household of English literature, but which had far too long and too +deeply sunk below it, becomes once more a worthy and even a venerable +presence. At evening-time it was light. + + +FOOTNOTES + +1. Coleridge made the acquaintance of this gentleman, who became his +enthusiastic disciple, in 1818. His chief interest for us is the fact +that for the next seven years he was Coleridge's correspondent. +Personally, he was a man of little judgment or critical discrimination, +and his sense of the ridiculous may be measured by the following +passage. Speaking of the sweetness of Charles Lamb's smile, he says +that "there is still one man living, a stockbroker, who has that +smile," and adds: "To those who wish to see the only thing left on +earth, _if it is still left_, of Lamb, his best and most beautiful +remain--his smile, I will indicate its possessor, Mr.---- of Throgmorton +Street." How the original "possessor" of this apparently assignable +security would have longed to "feel Mr. Allsop's head"! + + + + +CHAPTER IX + +Life at Highgate-Renewed activity-Publications and re-publications--The +_Biographia Literaria_--The lectures of 1818-Coleridge as a +Shakespearian critic. + +[1816-1818.] + + +The results of the step which Coleridge had just taken became speedily +visible in more ways than one, and the public were among the first to +derive benefit from it. For not only was he stimulated to greater +activity of production, but his now more methodical way of life gave +him time and inclination for that work of arrangement and preparation +for the press which, distasteful to most writers, was no doubt +especially irksome to him, and thus insured the publication of many +pieces which otherwise might never have seen the light. The appearance +of _Christabel_ was, as we have said, received with signal marks of +popular favour, three editions being called for and exhausted in the +same year. In 1816 there appeared also The Statesman's Manual; or the +Bible the best guide to Political Skill and Foresight: a Lay Sermon +addressed to the higher classes of Society, with an Appendix containing +Comments and Essays connected with the Study of the Inspired Writings; +in 1817, another _Lay Sermon addressed to the higher and middle +classes on the existing distresses and discontents;_ and in the same +year followed the most important publication of this period, the +_Biographia Literaria_. + +In 1817, too, it was that Coleridge at last made his long-meditated +collection and classification of his already published poems, and that +for the first time something approaching to a complete edition of the +poet's works was given to the world. The _Sibylline Leaves_, as +this reissue was called, had been intended to be preceded by another +volume of verse, and "accordingly on the printer's signatures of every +sheet we find Vol. II, appearing." Too characteristically, however, +the scheme was abandoned, and Volume II. emerged from the press +without any Volume I. to accompany it. The drama of _Zapolya_ +followed in the same year, and proved more successful with the public +than with the critic of Drury Lane. The "general reader" assigned no +"ludicrous objections to its metaphysics;" on the contrary, he took +them on trust, as his generous manner is, and _Zapolya_, +published thus as a Christmas tale, became so immediately popular +that two thousand copies were sold in six weeks. In the year 1818 +followed the three-volume selection of essays from the _Friend_, +a reissue to which reference has already been made. With the exception +of _Christabel_, however, all the publications of these three +years unfortunately proceeded from the house of Gale and Fenner, a +firm which shortly afterwards became bankrupt; and Coleridge thus +lost all or nearly all of the profits of their sale. + +The most important of the new works of this period was, as +has been said, the _Biographia Literaria_, or, to give it its +other title, _Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life and +Opinions_. Its interest, however, is wholly critical and +illustrative; as a narrative it would be found extremely disappointing +and probably irritating by the average reader. With the exception of +one or two incidental disclosures, but little biographical information +is to be derived from it which is not equally accessible from sources +independent of the author; and the almost complete want of sequence and +arrangement renders it a very inconvenient work of reference even for +these few biographical details. Its main value is to be found in the +contents of seven chapters, from the fourteenth to the twentieth; but +it is not going too far to say that, in respect of these, it is +literally priceless. No such analysis of the principles of poetry--no +such exact discrimination of what was sound in the modern "return-to- +nature" movement from what was false--has ever been accomplished by any +other critic, or with such admirable completeness by this consummate +critic at any other time. Undoubtedly it is not of the light order of +reading; none, or very little, of Coleridge's prose is. The whole of +chapter xv., for instance, in which the specific elements of "poetic +power" are "distinguished from general talent determined to poetic +composition by accidental motives," requires a close and sustained +effort of the attention, but those who bestow it will find it amply re- +paid. I know of no dissertation conceived and carried out in terms of +the abstract which in the result so triumphantly justifies itself upon +application to concrete cases, As regards the question of poetic +expression, and the laws by which its true form is determined, +Coleridge's analysis is, it seems to me, final. I cannot, at least, +after the most careful reflection upon it, conceive it as being other +than the absolutely last word on the subject. Reasoning and +illustration are alike so convincing that the reader, like the +contentious student who listened unwillingly to his professor's +demonstration of the first proposition of Euclid, is compelled to +confess that "he has nothing to reply." To the judicious admirer of +Wordsworth, to every one who, while recognising Wordsworth's +inestimable services to English literature as the leader of the +naturalist reaction in poetry, has yet been vaguely conscious of the +defect in his poetic theory, and very keenly conscious of the vices of +his poetic practice,--to all such persons it must be a profound relief +and satisfaction to be guided as unerringly as Coleridge guides them to +the "parting of the ways" of truth and falsity in Wordsworth's +doctrines, and to be enabled to perceive that nothing which has +offended him in that poet's thought and diction has any real connection +with whatever in the poet's principles has commanded his assent. There +is no one who has ever felt uneasy under the blasphemies of the enemy +but must entertain deep gratitude for so complete a discharge as +Coleridge has procured him from the task of defending such lines as + + "And I have travelled far as Hull to see + What clothes he might have left or other property." + +Defend them indeed the ordinary reader probably would not, preferring +even the abandonment of his theory to a task so humiliating. But the +theory has so much of truth and value in it that the critic who has +redeemed it from the discredit of Wordsworth's misapplications of it is +entitled to the thanks of every friend of simplicity, who is at the +same time an enemy of bathos. There is no longer any reason to treat +the deadly commonplaces, amid which we toil through so many pages of +the _Excursion_, as having any true theoretic affinity with its +but too occasional majestic interludes. The smooth square-cut blocks of +prose which insult the natural beauty of poetic rock and boulder even +in such a scene of naked moorland grandeur as that of _Resolution and +Independence_ are seen and shown to be the mere intruders which we +have all felt them to be. To the Wordsworthian, anxious for a full +justification of the faith that is in him, the whole body of +Coleridge's criticism on his friend's poetry in the _Biographia +Literaria_ may be confidently recommended. The refutation of what is +untenable in Wordsworth's theory, the censure pronounced upon certain +characteristics of his practice, are made all the more impressive by +the tone of cordial admiration which distinguishes every personal +reference to the poet himself, and by the unfailing discrimination with +which the critic singles out the peculiar beauties of his poetry. No +finer selection of finely characteristic Wordsworthian passages could +perhaps have been made than those which Coleridge has quoted in +illustration of his criticisms in the eighteenth and two following +chapters of the _Biographia Literaria_. For the rest, however, +unless indeed one excepts the four chapters on the Hartleian system and +its relation to the German school of philosophy, the book is rather one +to be dipped into for the peculiar pleasure which an hour in +Coleridge's company must always give to any active intelligence, than +to be systematically studied with a view to perfecting one's conception +of Coleridge's philosophical and critical genius considered in its +totality. + +As to the two lay sermons, the less ambitious of them is decidedly the +more successful. The advice to "the higher and middle classes" on the +existing distresses and discontents contains at least an ingredient of +the practical; its distinctively religious appeals are varied by sound +political and economical arguments; and the enumeration and exposure of +the various artifices by which most orators are accustomed to delude +their hearers is as masterly as only Coleridge could have made it. Who +but he, for instance, could have thrown a piece of subtle observation +into a form in which reason and fancy unite so happily to impress it +on the mind as in the following passage: "The mere appeal to the +auditors, whether the arguments are not such that none but an idiot or +an hireling could resist, is an effective substitute for any argument +at all. For mobs have no memories. They are in nearly the same state +as that of an individual when he makes what is termed a bull. _The +passions, like a fused metal, fill up the wide interstices of thought +and supply the defective links; and thus incompatible assertions are +harmonised by the sensation, without the sense of connection_." The +other lay sermon, however, the _Statesman's Manual_, is less +appropriately conceived. Its originating proposition, that the Bible is +"the best guide to political skill and foresight," is undoubtedly open +to dispute, but might nevertheless be capable of plausible defence upon +_à priori_ grounds. Coleridge, however, is not content with this +method of procedure; as, indeed, with so avowedly practical an object +in view he scarcely could be, for a "manual" is essentially a work +intended for the constant consultation of the artificer in the actual +performance of his work, and ought at least to contain illustrations of +the application of its general principles to particular cases. It is in +undertaking to supply these that the essential mysticism of Coleridge's +counsels comes to light. For instance: "I am deceived if you will not be +compelled to admit that the prophet Isaiah revealed the true philosophy +of the French Revolution more than two thousand years before it became a +sad irrevocable truth of history. 'And thou saidst, I shall be a lady +for ever, so that thou didst not lay these things to thy heart neither +didst remember the latter end of it.... Therefore shall evil come upon +thee; thou shalt not know from whence it riseth, etc.'" And to this +ast-quoted sentence Coleridge actually appends the following note: "The +reader will scarcely fail to find in this verse a remembrancer of the +sudden setting in of the frost before the usual time (in a country, +too, where the commencement of its two seasons is in general scarcely +less regular than that of the wet and dry seasons between the tropics) +which caused, and the desolation which accompanied, the flight from +Moscow." One can make no other comment upon this than that if it really + be wisdom which statesmen would do well to lay to heart, the late Dr. +Cumming must have been the most profound instructor in statesmanship +that the world has ever seen. A prime minister of real life, however, +could scarcely be seriously recommended to shape his policy upon a due +consideration of the possible allegoric meaning of a passage in Isaiah, +to say nothing of the obvious objection that this kind of appeal to +_Sortes Biblicæ_ is dangerously liable to be turned against those who +recommend it. On the whole, one must say of this lay sermon that it +justifies the apprehension expressed by the author in its concluding +pages. It does rather "resemble the overflow of an earnest mind than an +orderly and premeditated," in the sense, at any rate, of a well- +considered "composition." + +In the month of January 1818 Coleridge once more commenced the delivery +of a course of lectures in London. The scope of this series-fourteen in +number was, as will be seen from the subjoined syllabus, an immensely +comprehensive one. The subject of the first was "the manners, morals, +literature, philosophy, religion, and state of society in general in +European Christendom, from the eighth to the fifteenth century;" and of +the second "the tales and metrical romances common for the most part to +England, Germany, and the north of France; and English songs and ballads +continued to the reign of Charles I." In the third the lecturer proposed +to deal with the poetry of Chaucer and Spenser, of Petrarch, and of +Ariosto, Pulci, and Boiardo. The fourth, fifth, and sixth were to be +devoted to the dramatic works of Shakespeare, and to comprise the +substance of Coleridge's former courses on the same subject, "enlarged +and varied by subsequent study and reflection." In the seventh he was +to treat of the other principal dramatists of the Elizabethan period, +Ben Jonson, Massinger, and Beaumont and Fletcher; in the eighth of the +life and all the works of Cervantes; in the ninth of Rabelais, Swift, +and Sterne, with a dissertation "on the nature and constituents of +genuine humour, and on the distinctions of humorous from the witty, the +fanciful, the droll, the odd, etc." Donne, Dante, and Milton formed the +subject of the tenth; the _Arabian Nights Entertainment_, and the +_romantic_ use of the supernatural in poetry, that of the eleventh. +The twelfth was to be on "tales of witches and apparitions, etc.," as +distinguished from magic and magicians of Asiatic origin; and the +thirteenth,--"on colour, sound, and form in nature, as connected with +Poesy--the word 'Poesy' being used as the generic or class term +including poetry, music, painting, statuary, and ideal architecture as +its species, the reciprocal relations of poetry and philosophy to each +other, and of both to religion and the moral sense.'" In the fourteenth +and final lecture Coleridge proposed to discuss "the corruptions of the +English language since the reign of Queen Anne, in our style of writing +prose," and to formulate "a few easy rules for the attainment of a +manly, unaffected, and pure language in our genuine mother tongue, +whether for the purposes of writing, oratory, or conversation." + +These lectures, says Mr. Gillman, were from Coleridge's own account +more profitable than any he had before given, though delivered in an +unfavourable situation; a lecture-room in Flower de Luce Court, which, +however, being near the Temple, secured to him the benefit--if benefit +it were--of a considerable number of law students among his auditors. +It was the first time that his devoted guardian had ever heard him in +public, and he reports the significant fact that though Coleridge +lectured from notes, which he had carefully made, "it was obvious that +his audience were more delighted when, putting his notes aside, he +spoke extempore...." He was brilliant, fluent, and rapid; his words +seemed to flow as from a person repeating with grace and energy some +delightful poem. If he sometimes paused, it was not for the want of +words, but that he was seeking their most appropriate or most logical +arrangement. + +An incident related with extreme, though in a great measure +unconscious, drollery by Mr. Gillman in connection with a +lecture delivered at this period is to my mind of more assistance +than many of the accounts of his "lay sermons" in private circles, in +enabling us to comprehend one element of Coleridge's marvellous powers +of discourse. Early one morning at Mr. Gillman's he received two +letters-one to inform him that he was expected that same evening to +deliver a lecture, at the rooms of the London Philosophical Society, +to an audience of some four or five hundred persons; the other +containing a list of the previous lecturers and the lectures delivered +by them during the course of the season. At seven o'clock in the +evening Coleridge and Mr. Gillman went up to town to make some +inquiries respecting this unexpected application; but, on arriving at +the house of the gentleman who had written the letter, they were +informed that he was not at home, but would return at eight o'clock-- +the hour fixed for the commencement of the lecture. They then +proceeded to the Society's rooms, where in due time the audience +assembled; and the committee having at last entered and taken their +places on the seats reserved for them, "Mr. President arose from +the centre of the group, and, putting on a 'president's hat,' which +so disfigured him that we could scarcely refrain from laughter, +addressed the company in these words: This evening Mr. Coleridge +will deliver a lecture on 'the Growth of the Individual Mind.'" +Coleridge at first "seemed startled," as well he might, and turning +round to Mr. Gillman whispered: "A pretty stiff subject they have +chosen for me." However, he instantly mounted his standing-place and +began without hesitation, previously requesting his friend to observe +the effect of his lecture on the audience. It was agreed that, should +he appear to fail, Gillman was to "clasp his ancle; but that he was to +continue for an hour if the countenances of his auditors indicated +satisfaction." Coleridge then began his address in these words: "The +lecture I am about to give this evening is purely extempore. Should +you find a nominative case looking out for a verb, or a fatherless +verb for a nominative case, you must excuse it. It is purely extempore, +though I have read and thought much on the subject." At this the +company smiled, which seemed to inspire the lecturer with confidence. +He plunged at once into his lecture--and most brilliant, eloquent, and +logically consecutive it was. The time moved on so swiftly that Mr. +Gillman found, on looking at his watch, that an hour and a half had +passed away, and, therefore, he continues "waiting only a desirable +moment--to use his own playful words--I prepared myself to punctuate +his oration. As previously agreed, I pressed his ancle, and thus gave +him the hint he had requested; when, bowing graciously, and with a +benevolent and smiling countenance, he presently descended. The lecture +was quite new to me, and I believe quite new to himself so far as the +arrangement of his words was concerned. The floating thoughts were +beautifully arranged, and delivered on the spur of the moment. What +accident gave rise to the singular request, that he should deliver +this lecture impromptu, I never learnt; nor did it signify, as it +afforded a happy opportunity to many of witnessing in part the extent +of his reading and the extraordinary strength of his powers." + +It is tantalising to think that no record of this remarkable performance +remains; but, indeed, the same may to some extent be said, and in +various degrees, of nearly all the lectures which Coleridge ever +delivered. With the exception of seven out of the fifteen of 1811, +which were published in 1856 by Mr. Payne Collier from shorthand notes +taken at the time, Coleridge's lectures scarcely exist for us otherwise +than in the form of rough preparatory notes. A few longer pieces, such +as the admirable observations in the second volume of the _Literary +Remains_, on poetry, on the Greek drama, and on the progress of the +dramatic art in England, are, with the exception above noticed, almost +the only general disquisitions on these subjects which appear to have +reached us in a complete state. Of the remaining contents of the +volume, including the detailed criticisms now textual, now analytic--of +the various plays of Shakespeare, a considerable portion is frankly +fragmentary, pretending, indeed, to no other character than that of +mere marginalia. This, however, does not destroy--I had almost said it +does not even impair--their value. It does but render them all the more +typical productions of a writer, whose greatest services to mankind in +almost every department of human thought and knowledge with which he +concerned himself were much the most often performed in the least +methodical way. In reading through these incomparable notes on +Shakespeare we soon cease to lament, or even to remember, their +unconnected form and often somewhat desultory appearance; if, indeed, +we do not see reason to congratulate ourselves that the annotator, +unfettered by the restraints which the composition of a systematic +treatise would have imposed upon him, is free to range with us at will +over many a flower-strewn field, for which otherwise he could not +perhaps have afforded to quit the main road of his subject. And this +liberty is the more welcome, because Coleridge, _primus inter +pares_ as a critic of any order of literature, is in the domain of +Shakespearian commentary absolute king. The principles of analysis +which he was charged with having borrowed without acknowledgment from +Schlegel, with whose Shakespearian theories he was at the time entirely +unacquainted, were in fact of his own excogitation. He owed nothing in +this matter to any individual German, nor had he anything in common +with German Shakespearianism except its profoundly philosophising +spirit, which, moreover, was in his case directed and restrained by +other qualities, too often wanting in critics of that industrious race; +for he possessed a sense of the ridiculous, a feeling for the poetic, a +tact, a taste, and a judgment, which would have saved many a worthy but +heavy-handed Teutonic professor, who should have been lucky enough to +own these gifts, from exposing himself and his science to the satire of +the light-minded. Very rarely, indeed, do we find Coleridge indulging +_plus 'quo_ his passion for psychological analysis. Deeply as his +criticism penetrates, it is yet loyally recognitive of the opacity of +milestones. Far as he sees into his subject, we never find him fancying +that he sees beyond the point at which the faculty of human vision is +exhausted. His conception of the more complex of Shakespeare's +personages, his theory of their characters, his reading of their +motives, is often subtle, but always sane; his interpretation of the +master's own dealings with them, and of the language which he puts into +their mouths, is often highly imaginative, but it is rarely fanciful. +Take, as an illustration of the first-mentioned merit, the following +acute but eminently sensible estimate of the character of Polonius:-- + + +"He is the personified memory of wisdom no longer actually possessed. +This admirable character is always misrepresented on the stage. +Shakspeare never intended to exhibit him as a buffoon; for although it +was natural for Hamlet--a young man of fire and genius, detesting +formality and disliking Polonius on political grounds, as imagining +that he had assisted his uncle in his usurpation--should express +himself satirically, yet this must not be taken exactly as the poet's +conception of him. In Polonius a certain induration of character had +arisen from long habits of business; but take his advice to Laertes, +and Ophelia's reverence for his memory, and we shall see that he was +meant to be represented as a statesman somewhat past his faculties--his +recollections of life all full of wisdom, and showing a knowledge of +human nature, while what immediately takes place before him and escapes +from him is indicative of weakness." + +Or this comment on the somewhat faint individualisation of the figure of +Lear: + +"In Lear old age is itself a character-natural imperfections being +increased by life-long habits of receiving a prompt obedience. Any +addition of individualisation would have been unnecessary and painful; +for the relation of others to him, of wondrous fidelity and of frightful +ingratitude, alone sufficiently distinguish him. Thus Lear becomes the +open and ample playroom of nature's passions." + +Or lastly, in illustration of my second point, let us take this note on +the remark of the knight that "since my young lady's going into France the +fool hath much pined away ":-- + +"The fool is no comic buffoon--to make the groundlings laugh--no forced +condescension of Shakspeare's genius to the taste of his audience. +Accordingly the poet prepares us for the introduction, which he never does +with any of his common clowns and fools, by bringing him into living +connection with the pathos of the play. He is as wonderful a creation as +Caliban,--his wild babblings and inspired idiocy articulate and gauge the +horrors of the scene." + +The subject is a tempting one to linger over, did not imperative +Exigencies of space compel me to pass on from it. There is much--very +much--more critical matter in the Literary Remains of which it is hard to +forbear quotation; and I may mention in particular the profoundly +suggestive remarks on the nature of the humorous, with their accompanying +analysis of the genius and artistic method of Sterne. But it is, as has +been said, in Shakespearian criticism that Coleridge's unique mastery of +all the tools of the critic is most conspicuous, and it is in the +brilliant, if unmethodised, pages which I have been discussing that we +may most readily find consolation for the too early silencing of his +muse. For these consummate criticisms are essentially and above all the +criticisms of a poet They are such as could not have been achieved by +any man not originally endowed with that divine gift which was fated in +this instance to expend itself within so few years. Nothing, indeed, +could more strikingly illustrate the commanding advantage possessed by +a poet interpreting a poet than is to be found in Coleridge's +occasional sarcastic comments on the _banalit‚s_ of our national +poet's most prosaic commentator, Warburton--the "thought-swarming, but +idealess Warburton," as he once felicitously styles him. The one man +seems to read his author's text under the clear, diffused, unwavering +radiance emitted from his own poetic imagination; while the criticism +of the other resembles a perpetual scratching of damp matches, which +ash a momentary light into one corner of the dark assage, and then go +out. + + + + +CHAPTER X + +Closing years--Temporary renewal of money troubles--The Aids to Reflection +--Growing weakness-Visit to Germany with the Wordsworths--Last illness +and death. + +[1818-1834.] + + +For the years which now remained to Coleridge, some sixteen in number, +dating from his last appearance as a public lecturer, his life would +seem to have been attended with something, at least, of that sort of +happiness which is enjoyed by the nation of uneventful annals. There is +little to be told of him in the way of literary performance; little +record remains, unfortunately, of the discursively didactic talk in +which, during these years, his intellectual activity found its busiest +exercise; of incident in the ordinary sense of the word there is almost +none. An account of these closing days of his life must resolve itself +almost wholly into a "history of opinion,"--an attempt to reanimate for +ourselves that life of perpetual meditation which Coleridge lived, and +to trace, so far as the scanty evidence of his utterances enables us to +do so, the general tenor of his daily thoughts. From one point of view, +of course, this task would be extremely difficult, if not impossible; +from another comparatively easy. It is easy, that is to say, to +investigate Coleridge's speculations, so far as their subject is +concerned, whatever difficulties their obscurity and subtlety may +present to the inquirer; for, as a matter of fact, their subject is +remarkably uniform. Attempts to divide the literary life of a writer +into eras are more often arbitrary and fanciful than not; but the +peculiar circumstances of Coleridge's career did in fact effect the +division for themselves. His life until the age of twenty-six may +fairly be described as in its "poetic period." It was during these +years, and indeed during the last two or three of them, that he +produced all the poetry by which he will be remembered, while he +produced little else of mark or memorability. The twenty years which +follow from 1798 to 1818 may with equal accuracy be styled the +"critical period." It was during these years that he did his best work +as a journalist, and all his work as a public lecturer on aesthetics. +It was during them that he said his say, and even his final say, so far +as any public modes of expression were concerned, on politics and on +art. From 1818 to his death his life was devoted entirely to +metaphysics and theology, and with such close and constant reference to +the latter subject, to which indeed his metaphysics had throughout his +life been ancillary, that it deserves to give the name of the +"theological period" to these closing years. + +Their lack of incident, however, is not entirely as favourable a +circumstance as that uneventfulness of national annals to which I have +compared it; for, though "no news may be good news" in the case of a +nation's history, it is by no means as certainly so in the case of a +man's biography, and, least of all, when the subject is a man whose +inward life of thought and feeling so completely overshadowed his outward +life of action throughout his whole career. There is indeed evidence, +slight in amount, but conclusive in character-plain and painful evidence +enough to show that at least the first four or five years of the period we +have mentioned were not altogether years of resignation and calm; that +they were embittered by recurring agonies of self-reproach, by + + "Sense of past youth, and manhood come in vain, + And genius given, and knowledge won in vain;" + +and by the desolating thought that all which had been "culled in wood- +walks wild," and "all which patient toil had reared," were to be + + --"but flowers + Strewn on the corse, and borne upon the bier, + In the same coffin, for the self-same grave!" + +Here and there in the correspondence with Thomas Allsop we obtain a +glimpse into that vast half-darkened arena in which this captive spirit +self-condemned to the lions was struggling its last. To one strange and +hitherto unexplained letter I have already referred. It was written +from Ramsgate in the autumn of 1822, evidently under circumstances of +deep depression. But there is a letter nearly two years earlier in date +addressed to the same correspondent which contains by far the fullest +account of Coleridge's then condition of mind, the state of his +literary engagements and his literary projects, his completed and +uncompleted work. As usual with him it is stress of money matters that +prompts him to write, and he prefaces his request for assistance with +the following portentous catalogue of realised or contemplated schemes. +"Contemplated," indeed, is too modest a word, according to his own +account, to be applied to any one item in the formidable list. Of all +of them, he has, he tells Allsop, "already the written materials and +contents, requiring only to be put together from the loose papers and +commonplace in memorandum books, and needing no other change, whether +of omission, addition, or correction, than the mere act of arranging, +and the opportunity of seeing the whole collectively, bring with them +of course." Heads I. and II. of the list comprise those criticisms on +Shakespeare and the other principal Elizabethan dramatists; on Dante, +Spenser, Milton, Cervantes, Calderon; on Chaucer, Ariosto, Donne, +Rabelais, etc., which formed the staple of the course of lectures +delivered in 1818, and which were published after his death in the +first two of the four volumes of _Literary Remains_ brought out +under the editorship of Mr. H. N. Coleridge. Reserving No. III. for a +moment we find No. IV. to consist of "Letters on the Old and New +Testament, and on the Doctrines and Principles held in common by the +Fathers and Founders of the Reformation, addressed to a Candidate for +Holy Orders, including advice on the plan and subjects of preaching +proper to a minister of the Established Church." The letters never +apparently saw the light of publicity, at any rate, in the epistolary +form, either during the author's lifetime or after his death; and with +regard to II. and III., which did obtain posthumous publication, the +following caution should be borne in mind by the reader. "To the +completion," says Coleridge, "of these four works I have literally +nothing more to do than to transcribe; but, as I before hinted, from so +many scraps and Sibylline leaves, including margins of blank pages that +unfortunately I must be my own scribe, and, not done by myself, they +will be all but lost." As matters turned out he was not his own scribe, +and the difficulty which Mr. Nelson Coleridge experienced in piecing +together the fragmentary materials at his disposal is feelingly +described by him in his preface to the first edition. He added that the +contents of these volumes were drawn from a portion only of the MSS. +entrusted to him, and that the remainder of the collection, which, +under favourable circumstances, he hoped might hereafter see the +light, "was at least of equal value" with what he was then presenting to +the reader. This hope was never realised; and it must be remembered, +therefore, that the published record of Coleridge's achievements as a +critic is, as has already been pointed out, extremely imperfect. [1] +That it is not even more disappointingly so than it is, may well +entitle his nephew and editor to the gratitude of posterity; but where +much has been done, there yet remains much to do ere Coleridge's +consummate analyses of poetic and dramatic works can be presented to +the reader in other than their present shape of a series of detached +brilliancies. The pearls are there, but the string is wanting. Whether +it will be ever supplied, or whether it is possible now to supply it, +one cannot say. + +The third of Coleridge's virtually completed works there is much virtue +in a "virtually"-was a "History of Philosophy considered as a Tendency +of the Human Mind to exhibit the Powers of the Human Reason, to +discover by its own strength the Origin and Laws of Man and the World, +from Pythagoras to Locke and Condillac." This production, however, +considerable as it is, was probably merely ancillary to what he calls +"My GREAT WORK, to the preparation of which more than twenty years of +my life have been devoted, and on which my hopes of extensive and +permanent utility, of fame in the noblest sense of the word, mainly +rest." To this work he goes on to say: + +"All my other writings, unless I except my Poems (and these I can +exclude in part only), are introductory and preparative, while its +result, if the premises be as I with the most tranquil assurance am +convinced they are-incontrovertible, the deductions legitimate, and the +conclusions commensurate, and only commensurate with both [must be], to +effect a revolution in all that has been called Philosophy and +Metaphysics in England and France since the era of commencing +predominance of the mechanical system at the Restoration of our Second +Charles, and with [in] the present fashionable views not only of +religion, morals, and politics, but even of the modern physics and +physiology." + +This, it must be allowed, is a sufficiently "large order," being +Apparently indeed nothing less than an undertaking to demolish the +system of Locke and his successors, and to erect German +Transcendentalism on the ruins. With anything less than this, however +with any less noble object or less faith in their attainments-- +Coleridge could not, he declares, have stood acquitted of folly and +abuse of time, talent, and learning, on a labour of three--fourths of +his intellectual life. Somewhat more than a volume of this _magnum +opus_ had been dictated by him to his "friend and enlightened pupil, +Mr. Green, so as to exist fit for the press;" and more than as much +again had been done, but he had been compelled to break off the weekly +meetings with his pupil from the necessity of writing on subjects of +the passing day. Then comes a reference, the last we meet with, to the +real "great work," as the unphilosophic world has always considered and +will always consider it. On this subject he says: + +"Of my poetic works I would fain finish the _Christabel_, Alas! +for the proud time when I planned, when I had present to my mind the +materials as well as the scheme of the Hymns entitled Spirit, Sun, +Earth, Air, Water, Fire, and Man; and the Epic Poem on what appears to +me the only fit subject remaining for an Epic Poem--Jerusalem besieged +and destroyed by Titus." + +And then there follows this most pathetic passage, necessary, in spite +of its length, to be transcribed entire, both on account of the value +of its biographic details--its information on the subject of the useless +worldly affairs, etc.--and because of the singularly penetrating light +which it throws upon the mental and moral nature of the man:-- + +"I have only by fits and starts ever prayed--I have not prevailed upon +myself to pray to God in sincerity and entireness for the fortitude +that might enable me to resign myself to the abandonment of all my +life's best hopes, to say boldly to myself, 'Gifted with powers +confessedly above mediocrity, aided by an education of which no less +from almost unexampled hardships and sufferings than from manifold and +peculiar advantages I have never yet found a parallel, I have devoted +myself to a life of unintermitted reading, thinking, meditating, and +observing, I have not only sacrificed all worldly prospects of wealth +and advancement, but have in my inmost soul stood aloof from temporary +reputation. In consequence of these toils and this self-dedication I +possess a calm and clear consciousness that in many and most important +departments of truth and beauty I have outstrode my contemporaries, +those at least of highest name, that the number of my. printed works +bear witness that I have not been idle, and the seldom acknowledged but +strictly _proveable_ effects of my labours appropriated to the +welfare of my age in the _Morning Post_ before the peace of +Amiens, in the _Courier_ afterwards, and in the serious and +various subjects of my lectures... (add to which the unlimited freedom +of my communications to colloquial life) may surely be allowed as +evidence that I have not been useless to my generation. But, from +circumstances, the main portion of my harvest is still on the ground, +ripe indeed and only waiting, a few for the sickle, but a large part +only for the _sheaving_ and carting and housing-but from all this +I must turn away and let them rot as they lie, and be as though they +never had been; for I must go and gather black berries and earth-nuts, +or pick mushrooms and gild oak-apples for the palate and fancies of +chance customers. I must abrogate the name of philosopher and poet, and +scribble as fast as I can and with as little thought as I can for +_Blackwood's Magazine_, or as I have been employed for the last +days in writing MS. sermons for lazy clergymen who stipulate that the +composition must be more than respectable.'... This" [_i.e._ to +say this to myself] "I have not yet had courage to do. My soul sickens +and my heart sinks, and thus oscillating between both" [forms of +activity--the production of permanent and of ephemeral work] "I do +neither--neither as it ought to be done to any profitable end." + +And his proposal for extricating himself from this distressing position +is that "those who think respectfully and hope highly of my power and +attainments should guarantee me a yearly sum for three or four years, +adequate to my actual support, with such comforts and decencies of +appearance as my health and habit have made necessaries, so that my +mind may be unanxious as far as the present time is concerned." Thus +provided for he would undertake to devote two-thirds of his time to +some one work of those above mentioned that is to say, of the first +four--and confine it exclusively to it till finished, while the +remaining third of his time he would go on maturing and completing his +"great work," and "(for, if but easy in my mind, I have no doubt either +of the reawakening power or of the kindling inclination) my +_Christabel_ and what else the happier hour may inspire." Mr. +Green, he goes on to say, had promised to contribute £30 to £40 yearly, +another pupil, "the son of one of my dearest old friends, £50," and £10 +or £20 could, he thought, be relied on from another. The whole amount +of the required annuity would be about £200, to be repaid of course +should disposal or sale of his works produce, or as far as they should +produce, the means. But "am I entitled," he asks uneasily, "have I a +_right_ to do this I Can I do it without moral degradation? And +lastly, can it be done without loss of character in the eyes of my +acquaintances and of my friends' acquaintances?" + +I cannot take upon myself to answer these painful questions. The reply +to be given to them must depend upon the judgment which each individual +student of this remarkable but unhappy career may pass upon it as a +whole; and, while it would be too much to expect that that judgment +should be entirely favourable, one may at least believe that a fair +allowance for those inveterate weaknesses of physical constitution +which so largely aggravated, if they did not wholly generate, the fatal +infirmities of Coleridge's moral nature, must materially mitigate the +harshness of its terms. + +The story of Coleridge's closing years is soon told. It is mainly a +record of days spent in meditation and discourse, in which character it +will be treated of more fully in a subsequent chapter. His literary +productions during the last fourteen years of his life were few in +number, and but one of them of any great importance. In 1821 he had +offered himself as an occasional contributor to _Blackwood's +Magazine_, but a series of papers promised by him to that periodical +were uncompleted, and his only two contributions (in October 1821 and +January 1822) are of no particular note. In May 1825 he read a paper on +the _Prometheus_ of 'schylus before the Royal Society of Literature; +but "the series of disquisitions respecting the Egyptian in connection +with the sacerdotal theology and in contrast with the mysteries of +ancient Greece," to which this essay had been announced as preparatory, +never made their appearance. In the same year, however, he published +one of the best known of his prose works, his _Aids to Reflection_. + +Of the success of this latest of Coleridge's more important +contributions to literature there can be no doubt. New editions of it +seem to have been demanded at regular intervals for some twenty years +after its first production, and it appears to have had during the same +period a relatively equal reissue in the United States. The Rev. Dr. +James Marsh, an American divine of some ability and reputation, +composed a preliminary essay (now prefixed to the fifth English +edition), in which he elaborately set forth the peculiar merits of the +work, and undertook to initiate the reader in the fittest and most +profitable method of making use of it. In these remarks the reverend +essayist insists more strongly on the spiritually edifying quality of +the _Aids_ than on their literary merits, and, for my own part, I +must certainly consider him right in doing so. As a religious manual it +is easy to understand how this volume of Coleridge's should have +obtained many and earnest readers. What religious manual, which shows +traces of spiritual insight, or even merely of pious yearnings after +higher and holier than earthly things, has ever failed to win such +readers among the weary and heavy-laden of the world? And that +Coleridge, a writer of the most penetrating glance into divine +mysteries, and writing always from a soul all tremulous, as it were, +with religious sensibility, should have obtained such readers in +abundance is not surprising. But to a critic and literary biographer I +cannot think that his success in this respect has much to say. For my +own part, at any rate, I find considerable difficulty in tracing it to +any distinctively literary origin. There seems to me to be less charm +of thought, less beauty of style, less even of Coleridge's seldom- +failing force of effective statement, in the _Aids to Reflection_ +than in almost any of his writings. Even the volume of some dozen short +chapters on the Constitution of the Church and State, published in +1830, as an "aid towards a right judgment in the late Catholic Kelief +Bill," appears to me to yield a more characteristic flavour of the +author's style, and to exhibit far more of his distinction of literary +workmanship than the earlier and more celebrated work. + +Among the acquaintances made by Coleridge after his retirement to Mr. +Gillman's was one destined to be of some importance to the history of +his philosophical work. It was that of a gentleman whose name has +already been mentioned in this chapter, Mr. Joseph Henry Green, +afterwards a distinguished surgeon and Fellow of the Royal Society, who +in his early years had developed a strong taste for metaphysical +speculation, going even so far as to devote one of his hard-earned +periods of professional holiday to a visit to Germany for the sake of +studying philosophy in that home of abstract thought. To him Coleridge +was introduced by his old Roman acquaintance, Ludwig Tieck, on one of +the latter's visits to England, and he became, as the extract above +quoted from Coleridge's correspondence shows, his enthusiastic disciple +and indefatigable fellow-worker. In the pursuit of their common studies +and in those weekly reunions of admiring friends which Coleridge, while +his health permitted it, was in the habit of holding, we may believe +that a considerable portion of these closing years of his life was +passed under happier conditions than he had been long accustomed to. It +is pleasant to read of him among his birds and flowers, and surrounded +by the ever-watchful tendance of the affectionate Gillmans, tranquil in +mind at any rate, if not at ease from his bodily ailments, and +enjoying, as far as enjoyment was possible to him, the peaceful close +of a stormy and unsettled day. For the years 1825-30, moreover, his +pecuniary circumstances were improved to the extent of £105 per annum, +obtained for him at the instance of the Royal Society of Literature, +and held by him till the death of George IV. + +Two incidents of his later years are, however, worthy of more special +mention--a tour up the Rhine, which he took in 1828, in company with +Wordsworth and his daughter; and, some years earlier, a meeting with +John Keats. "A loose, slack, not well dressed youth," it is recorded in +the _Table Talk,_ published after his death by his nephew, "met +Mr.------" (it was Mr. Green, of whom more hereafter) "and myself in a +lane near Highgate. Green knew him and spoke. It was Keats. He was +introduced to me, and stayed a minute or so. After he had left us a +little way, he came back and said, 'Let me carry away the memory, +Coleridge, of having pressed your hand.' 'There is death in that hand,' +I said to Green when Keats was gone; yet this was, I believe, before +the consumption showed itself distinctly." + +His own health, however, had been steadily declining in these latter +years, and the German tour with the Wordsworths must, I should imagine, +have been the last expedition involving any considerable exercise of +the physical powers which he was able to take. Within a year or so +afterwards his condition seems to have grown sensibly worse. In +November 1831 he writes that for eighteen months past his life had been +"one chain of severe sicknesses, brief and imperfect convalescences, +and capricious relapses." Henceforth he was almost entirely confined to +the sick-room. His faculties, however, still remained clear and +unclouded. The entries in the _Table Talk_ do not materially +dimmish in frequency. Their tone of colloquy undergoes no perceptible +variation; they continue to be as stimulating and delightful reading as +ever. Not till 11th July 1834 do we find any change; but here at last +we meet the shadow, deemed longer than it was in reality, of the +approaching end. "I am dying," said Coleridge, "but without expectation +of a speedy release. Is it not strange that, very recently, bygone +images and scenes of early life have stolen into my mind like breezes +blown from the spice-islands of Youth and Hope--those twin realities of +the phantom world! I do not add Love, for what is Love but Youth and +Hope embracing, and, so seen, as _one_.... Hooker wished to live +to finish his _Ecclesiastical Polity_--so I own I wish life and +strength had been spared to me to complete my _Philosophy._ For, +as God hears me, the originating, continuing, and sustaining wish and +design in my heart were to exalt the glory of His name; and, which is +the same thing in other words, to promote the improvement of mankind. +But _visum aliter Deo,_ and His will be done." + +The end was nearer than he thought. It was on the 11th of July, as has +been said, that he uttered these last words of gentle and pious +resignation. On that day fortnight he died. Midway, however, in this +intervening period, he knew that the "speedy release" which he had not +ventured to expect was close at hand. The death, when it came, was in +some sort emblematic of the life. Sufferings severe and constant, till +within thirty-six hours of the end: at the last peace. On the 25th of +July 1834 this sorely-tried, long-labouring, fate-marred and self- +marred life passed tranquilly away. The pitiful words of Kent over his +dead master rise irrepressibly to the lips-- + + "O let him pass: he hates him + Who would upon the rack of this tough world + Stretch him out longer." + +There might have been something to be said, though not by Kent, of the +weaknesses of Lear himself; but at such a moment compassion both for +the king and for the poet may well impose silence upon censure. + + +FOOTNOTES + +1. How imperfect, a comparison between estimated and actual bulk will +show. No. I. was, according to Coleridge's reckoning, to form three +volumes of 500 pages each. In the Literary Remains it fills less than +half of four volumes of little more than 400 pages each. + + + + +CHAPTER XI + +Coleridge's metaphysics and theology--The _Spiritual Philosophy_ +of Mr. Green. + + +In spite of all the struggles, the resolutions, and the entreaties +which displayed themselves so distressingly in the letter to Mr. +Allsop, quoted in the last chapter, it is doubtful whether Coleridge's +"great work" made much additional progress during the last dozen years +of his life. The weekly meeting with Mr. Green seems, according to the +latter's biographer, to have been resumed. Mr. Simon tells us that he +continued year after year to sit at the feet of his Gamaliel, getting +more and more insight into his opinions, until, in 1834, two events +occurred which determined the remaining course of Mr. Green's life. One +of these events, it is needless to say, was Coleridge's death; the +other was the death of his disciple's father, with the result of +leaving Mr. Green possessed of such ample means as to render him +independent of his profession. The language of Coleridge's will, +together, no doubt, with verbal communications which had passed, +imposed on Mr. Green what he accepted as an obligation to devote so far +as necessary the whole remaining strength and earnestness of his life +to the one task of systematising, developing, and establishing the +doctrines of the Coleridgian philosophy. Accordingly, in 1836, two +years after his master's death, he retired from medical practice, and +thenceforward, until his own death nearly thirty years afterwards, he +applied himself unceasingly to what was in a twofold sense a labour of +love. + +We are not, it seems from his biographer's account, to suppose that Mr. +Green's task was in any material degree lightened for him by his previous +collaboration with Coleridge. The latter had, as we have seen, declared +in his letter to Allsop that "more than a volume" of the great work had +been dictated by him to Mr. Green, so as to exist in a condition fit for +the press: but this, according to Mr. Simon, was not the case; and the +probability is therefore that "more than a volume" meant written material +equal in amount to more than a volume--of course, an entirely different +thing. Mr. Simon, at any rate, assures us that no available written +material existed for setting comprehensively before the public, in +Coleridge's own language, and in an argued form, the philosophical system +with which he wished his name to be identified. Instead of it there were +fragments--for the most part mutually inadaptable fragments, and +beginnings, and studies of special subjects, and numberless notes on the +margins and fly-leaves of books. + +With this equipment, such as it was, Mr. Green set to work to methodise +the Coleridgian doctrines, and to construct from them nothing less than +such a system of philosophy as should "virtually include the law and +explanation of all being, conscious and unconscious, and of all +correlativity and duty, and be applicable directly or by deduction to +whatsoever the human mind can contemplate--sensuous or supersensuous--of +experience, purpose, or imagination." Born under post-diluvian +conditions, Mr. Green was of course unable to accomplish his self- +proposed enterprise, but he must be allowed to have attacked his task +with remarkable energy. "Theology, ethics, politics and political +history, ethnology, language, aesthetics, psychology, physics, and the +allied sciences, biology, logic, mathematics, pathology, all these +subjects," declares his biographer, "were thoughtfully studied by him, in +at least their basial principles and metaphysics, and most were +elaborately written of, as though for the divisions of some vast +cyclop'dic work." At an early period of his labours he thought it +convenient to increase his knowledge of Greek; he began to study Hebrew +when more than sixty years old, and still later in life he took up +Sanscrit. It was not until he was approaching his seventieth year and +found his health beginning to fail him that Mr. Green seems to have felt +that his design, in its more ambitious scope, must be abandoned, and +that, in the impossibility of applying the Coleridgian system of +philosophy to all human knowledge, it was his imperative duty under his +literary trust to work out that particular application of it which its +author had most at heart. Already, in an unpublished work which he had +made it the first care of his trusteeship to compose, he had, though but +roughly and imperfectly, as he considered, exhibited the relation of his +master's doctrines to revealed religion, and it had now become time to +supersede this unpublished compendium, the _Religio Laici_, as he +had styled it, by a fuller elaboration of the great Coleridgian position, +that "Christianity, rightly understood, is identical with the highest +philosophy, and that, apart from all question of historical evidence, the +essential doctrines of Christianity are necessary and eternal truths of +reason--truths which man, by the vouchsafed light of Nature and without +aid from documents or tradition, may always and anywhere discover for +himself." To this work accordingly Mr. Green devoted the few remaining +years of his life, and, dying in 1863 at the age of seventy-two, left +behind him in MS. the work entitled _Spiritual Philosophy: founded on +the teaching of the late Samuel Taylor Coleridge,_ which was published +two years later, together with the memoir of the author, from which I +have quoted, by Mr. John Simon. It consists of two volumes, the first of +which is devoted to the exposition of the general principles of +Coleridge's philosophy, while the second is entirely theological, and +aims at indicating on principles for which the first volume has +contended, the essential doctrines of Christianity. + +The earlier chapters of this volume Mr. Green devotes to an exposition +(if indeed the word can be applied to what is really a catalogue of the +results of a transcendental intuition) of the essential difference +between the reason and the understanding--a distinction which Coleridge +has himself elsewhere described as preeminently the _gradus ad +philosophiam,_ and might well have called its _pons asinorum._ In +the second part of his first volume Mr. Green applies himself to the +establishment of a position which, fundamental as it must be accounted in +all philosophical speculations of this school, is absolutely vital to the +theology which Coleridge sought to erect upon a metaphysical basis. This +position is that the human will is to be regarded as the one ultimate +fact of self-consciousness. So long as man confines himself to the +contemplation of his percipient and reflective self alone--so long as he +attends only to those modes of consciousness which are produced in him by +the impressions of the senses and the operations of thought, he can never +hope to escape from the famous _reductio ad inscibile_ of Hume. He +can never affirm anything more than the existence of those modes of +consciousness, or assert, at least as a direct deliverance of intuition, +that his conscious self _is_ anything apart from the perceptions and +concepts to which he is attending. But when he turns from his perceiving +and thinking to his willing self he becomes for the first time aware of +something deeper than the mere objective presentations of consciousness; +he obtains a direct intuition of an originant, causative, and independent +self-existence. He will have attained in short to the knowledge of a +noumenon, and of the only knowable noumenon. The barrier, elsewhere +insuperable between the subject and object, is broken down; that which +_knows_ becomes identified with that which _is;_ and in the +consciousness of will the consciousness also of a self, as something +independent of and superior to its own modifications, is not so much +affirmed as acquired. The essence, in short, of the Coleridgian ontology +consists in the alteration of a single though a very important word in +the well-known Cartesian formula. _Cogito ergo sum_ had been shown +by Hume to involve an illicit process of reasoning. Descartes, according +to the Scottish sceptic, had no right to have said more than _Cogito +ergo cogitationes sunt._ But substitute willing for thinking, convert +the formula into _Volo ergo sum_, and it becomes irrefragable. + +So far as I can perceive, it would have been sufficient for Mr. Green's +subsequent argument to have thus established the position of the will as +the ultimate fact of consciousness, but he goes on to assert that he has +thus secured the immovable ground of a philosophy of Realism. For since +man, "in affirming his Personality by the verb substantive I am, asserts, +nay, acquires, the knowledge of his own Substance as a Spiritual being, +and thereby knows what substance truly and properly is--so he +contemplates the outward, persons or things, as subjects partaking of +reality by virtue of the same substance of which he is conscious in his +own person." So far, however, from this being a philosophy of Realism, it +is in effect, if not indeed in actual terms, a philosophy of Idealism. I, +at least, am unable to see how any Idealist, from Berkeley downwards, +could ask for a better definition of his theory of the external world +than that it "partakes of reality by virtue of the same substance of +which he is conscious in his own person." + +But it is, of course, with the second volume of Mr. Green's work that one +is chiefly concerned. Had Coleridge been a mere Transcendentalist for +Transcendentalism's sake, had there been no connection between his +philosophy of Being and his religious creed, it might be a question +whether even the highly condensed and necessarily imperfect sketch which +has here been given of it would not have been superfluous and out of +place. But Coleridge was a Theosophist first, and a philosopher +afterwards; it was mainly as an organon of religion that he valued his +philosophy, and it was to the development and perfection of it, _as +such organon,_ that he may be said to have devoted, so far as it could +be redeemed from its enthralment to lower necessities, the whole of the +latter half of his career. No account of his life, therefore, could be +complete without at least some brief glance at the details of this +notable attempt to lead the world to true religion by the road of the +Transcendental philosophy. It is difficult, of course, for those who have +been trained in a wholly differet school of thought to do justice to +processes of reasoning carried on, as they cannot but hold, in terms of +the inconceivable; it is still more difficult to be sure that you have +done justice to it after all has been said; and I think that no candid +student of the Coleridgian philosophico-theology (not being a professed +disciple of it, and therefore bound, at any rate, to feign familiarity +with incomprehensibilities) will deny that he is often compelled, to +formulate its positions and recite its processes in somewhat of the same +modest and confiding spirit as animates those youthful geometricians who +leacn their Euclid by heart. With this proviso I will, as briefly as may +be, trace the course of the dialectic by which Mr. Green seeks to make +the Coleridgian metaphysics demonstrative of the truth of Christianity. + +Having shown that the Will is the true and the only tenable base of +Philosophic Realism, the writer next proceeds to explain the growth of +the Soul, from its rudimental strivings in its fallen condition to the +development of its spiritual capabilities and to trace its ascent to the +conception of the Idea of God. The argument--if we may apply so definite +a name to a process which is continually forced to appeal to something +that may perhaps be higher, but is certainly _other_ than the +ratiocinative faculty--is founded partly on moral and partly on +intellectual considerations. By an analysis of the moral phenomena +associated with the action of the human will, and, in particular, of the +conflict which arises between "the tendency of all Will to make itself +absolute," and the consciousness that, under the conditions of man's +fallen state, nothing but misery could result both to the individual and +the race from the fulfilment of this tendency,--Mr. Green shows how the +Soul, or the Reason, or the Speculative Intellect (for he seems to use +all three expressions indiscriminately) is morally prepared for the +reception of the truth which his Understanding alone could never have +compassed,--the Idea of God. This is in effect neither more nor less than +a restatement of that time-honoured argument for the existence of some +Being of perfect holiness which has always weighed so much with men of +high spirituality as to blind them to the fact of its actually enhancing +the intellectual difficulties of the situation. Man possesses a Will +which longs to fulfil itself; but it is coupled with a nature which +constantly impels him to those gratifications of will which tend not to +self-preservation and progress, but to their contraries. Surely, then, on +the strength of the mere law of life, which prevails everywhere, here +must be some higher archetypal Will, to which human wills, or rather +certain selected examples of them, may more and more conform themselves, +and in which the union of unlimited efficiency in operation with +unqualified purity of aim has been once for all effected. Or to put it +yet another way: The life of the virtuous man is a life auxiliary to the +preservation and progress of the race; but his will is under restraint. +The will of the vicious man energises freely enough, but his life is +hostile to the preservation and progress of the race. Now the natural and +essential _nisus_ of all Will is towards absolute freedom. But +nothing in life has a natural and essential _nisus_ towards that +which tends to its deterioration and extinction. Therefore, there must be +some ultimate means of reconciling absolute freedom of the Will with +perfectly salutary conditions of its exercise. And since Mr. Green, like +his master and all other Platonists, is incapable of stopping here, and +contenting himself with assuming the existence of a "stream of tendency" +which will gradually bring the human will into the required conditions, +he here makes the inevitable Platonic jump, and proceeds to conclude that +there must be a self-existent ideal Will in which absolute freedom and +power concur with perfect purity and holiness. + +So much for the moral part of Mr. Green's proof, which so far fails, it +will be observed, to carry us much beyond the Pantheistic position. It +has, that is to say, to be proved that the "power not ourselves," which +has been called Will, originates in some source to which we should be +rationally justified in giving the name of "God;" and, singular as such a +thing may seem, it is impossible at any rate for the logic of the +understanding to regard Mr. Green's argument on this point as otherwise +than hopelessly circular. The half-dozen pages or so which he devotes to +the refutation of the Pantheistic view reduce themselves to the following +simple _petitio principii:_ the power is first assumed to be a Will; +it is next affirmed with perfect truth that the very notion of Will would +escape us except under the condition of Personality; and from this the +existence of a personal God as the source of the power in question +deduced. And the same vice underlies the further argument by which Mr. +Green meets the familiar objection to the personality of the Absolute as +involving contradictory conceptions. An infinite Person, he argues, is no +contradiction in terms, unless "finition or limitation" be regarded as +identical with "negation" (which, when applied to a hypothetical +Infinite, one would surely think it is); and an Absolute Will is not the +less absolute from being self-determined _ab intra._ For how, he +asks, can any Will which is causative of reality be conceived as a Will +except by conceiving it as _se finiens,_ predetermining itself to +the specific processes required by the act of causation? How, indeed? But +the answer of a Pantheist would of course be that the very impossibility +of conceiving of Will except as _se finiens_ is his very ground for +rejecting the notion of a volitional (in the sense of a personal) origin +of the cosmos. + +However, it is beyond my purposes to enter into any detailed criticism of +Mr. Green's position, more especially as I have not yet reached the +central and capital point of his spiritual philosophy--the construction +of the Christian theology on the basis of the Coleridgian metaphysics. +Having deduced the Idea of God from man's consciousness of an individual +Will perpetually affirming itself, Mr. Green proceeds to evolve the Idea +of the Trinity, by (as he considers it) an equally necessary process from +two of the invariable accompaniments of the above-mentioned introspective +act. "For as in our consciousness," he truly says, "we are under the +necessity of distinguishing the relation of 'myself,' now as the +_subject_ thinking and now as the _object_ contemplated in the +manifold of thought, so we might express the relations in the Divine +instance as _Deus Subjectivus_ and _Deus Objectimis,_--that is, +the Absolute Subjectivity or Supreme Will, uttering itself as and +contemplating itself in the Absolute Objectivity or plenitude of Being +eternally and causatively realised in his Personality." Whence it follows +(so runs or seems to run the argument) that the Idea of God the Father as +necessarily involves the Idea of God the Son as the "I" who, as the +thinking subject, contemplate myself, implies the contemplated "Me" as +the object thought of. Again, the man who reflects on the fact of his +consciousness, "which discloses to him the unavoidable opposition of +subject and object in the self of which he is conscious, cannot fail to +see that the conscious mind requires not only the distinction in order to +the act of reflection in itself, but the continual sense of the relative +nature of the distinction and of the essential oneness of the mind +itself." Whence it follows (so runs or seems to run the argument) that +the Idea of the first two Persons of the Trinity as necessarily involves +the Idea of the Third Person, as the contemplation of the "Me" by the "I" +implies the perpetual consciousness that the contemplator and the +contemplated--the "I" and the "Me"--are one. In this manner is the Idea +of the Trinity shown to be involved in the Idea of God, and to arise out +of it by an implication as necessary as that which connects together the +three phases of consciousness attendant upon every self-contemplative act +of the individual mind. [1] + +It may readily be imagined that after the Speculative Reason has been +made to perform such feats as these the remainder of the work proposed to +it could present no serious difficulty. And in the half-dozen chapters +which follow it is made to evolve in succession the doctrine of the +Incarnation, the Advent, and the Atonement of Christ, and to explain the +mysteries of the fall of man and of original sin. Considered in the +aspect in which Coleridge himself would have preferred to regard his +pupil's work, namely as a systematic attempt to lead the minds of men to +Christianity by an intellectual route, no more hopeless enterprise +perhaps could have been conceived than that embodied in these volumes. It +is like offering a traveller a guide-book written in hieroglyphics. Upon +the most liberal computation it is probable that not one-fourth part of +educated mankind are capable of so much as comprehending the philosophic +doctrine upon which Coleridge seeks to base Christianity, and it is +doubtful whether any but a still smaller fraction of these would admit +that the foundation was capable of supporting the superstructure. That +the writings of the pupil, like the teachings of the master whom he +interprets, may serve the cause of religion in another than an +intellectual way is possible enough. Not a few of the functions assigned +to the Speculative Reason will strike many of us as moral and spiritual +rather than intellectual in their character, and the appeal to them is in +fact an appeal to man to chasten the lower passions of his nature, and to +discipline his unruly will. Exhortations of that kind are religious all +the world of philosophy over, and will succeed in proportion to the moral +fervour and oratorical power which distinguish them. But if the benefits +of Coleridge's theological teachings are to be reduced to this, it would +of course have been much better to have dissociated them altogether from +the exceedingly abstruse metaphysic to which they have been wedded. + + +FOOTNOTES + +1. Were it not hazardous to treat processes of the Speculative Reason +as we deal with the vulgar dialectic of the Understanding, one would be +disposed to reply that if the above argument proves the existence of +three persons in the Godhead, it must equally prove the existence of +three persons in every man who reflects upon his conscious self. That +the Divine Mind, when engaged in the act of self-contemplation, must be +conceived under three relations is doubtless as true as that the human +mind, when so engaged, must be so conceived; but that these three +relations are so many objective realities is what Mr. Green asserts +indeed a few pages farther on, but what he nowhere attempts to prove. + + + + +CHAPTER XII. + +Coleridge's position in his later years--His discourse--His influence +on contemporary thought--Final review of his intellectual work. + + +The critic who would endeavour to appreciate the position which +Coleridge fills in the history of literature and thought for the first +half of the nineteenth century must, if he possesses ordinary candour +and courage, begin, I think, with a confession. He must confess an +inability to comprehend the precise manner in which that position was +attained, and the precise grounds on which it was recognised. For vast +as were Coleridge's powers of thought and expression, and splendid, if +incomplete, as is the record which they have left behind them in his +works, they were never directed to purposes of instruction or +persuasion in anything like that systematic and concentrated manner +which is necessary to him who would found a school. Coleridge's +writings on philosophical and theological subjects were essentially +discursive, fragmentary, incomplete. Even when he professes an +intention of exhausting his subject and affects a logical arrangement, +it is not long before he forgets the design and departs from the order. +His disquisitions are in no sense connected treatises on the subjects +to which they relate. Brilliant _apercus,_ gnomic sayings, flights +of fervid eloquence, infinitely suggestive reflections--of these there +is enough and to spare; but these, though an ample equipment for the +critic, are not sufficient for the constructive philosopher. Nothing, +it must be frankly said, in Coleridge's philosophical and theological +writings--nothing, that is to say, which appeals in them to the mere +intelligence--suffices to explain, at least to the appreciation of +posterity, the fact that he was surrounded during these closing years +of his life by an eager crowd of real or supposed disciples, including +two, at any rate, of the most remarkable personalities of the time. And +if nothing in Coleridge's writings serves to account for it, so neither +does anything traceable or tangible in the mere matter of his +conversations. This last point, however, is one which must be for the +present reserved. I wish for the moment to confine myself to the fact +of Coleridge's position during his later life at Highgate. To this we +have, as we all know, an extremely eminent witness, and one from whose +evidence most people, one may suppose, are by this time able to make +their own deductions in all matters relating to the persons with whom +he was brought into contact. Carlyle on Charles Lamb, few as the sour +sentences are, must always warn us to be careful how we follow Carlyle +"on" anybody whomsoever. But there is no evidence of any ill feeling on +Carlyle's part towards Coleridge--nothing but a humorous, kindly- +contemptuous compassion for his weaknesses and eccentricities; and the +famous description in the _Life of Sterling_ may be taken +therefore as a fairly accurate account of the man and the circumstances +to which it refers:-- + +"Coleridge sat on the brow of Highgate Hill in those years, looking +down on London and its smoke tumult like a sage escaped from the +inanity of life's battle, attracting towards him the thoughts of +innumerable brave souls still engaged there. His express +contributions to poetry, philosophy, or any specific province of human +literature or enlightenment had been small and sadly intermittent; but +he had, especially among young inquiring men, a higher than literary, a +kind of prophetic or magician character. He was thought to hold--he +alone in England--the key of German and other Transcendentalisms; knew +the sublime secret of believing by the 'reason' what the +'understanding' had been obliged to fling out as incredible; and could +still, after Hume and Voltaire had done their best and worst with him, +profess himself an orthodox Christian, and say and print to the Church +of England, with its singular old rubrics and surplices at +Allhallowtide, _Esto perpetua._ A sublime man; who alone in those +dark days had saved his crown of spiritual manhood, escaping from the +black materialisms and revolutionary deluges with 'God, Freedom, +Immortality,' still his; a king of men. The practical intellects of the +world did not much heed him, or carelessly reckoned him a metaphysical +dreamer; but to the rising spirits of the young generation he had this +dusky sublime character, and sat there as a kind of Magus, girt in +mystery and enigma; his Dodona oak-grove (Mr. Gillman's house at +Highgate) whispering strange things, uncertain whether oracles or +jargon." + +The above quotation would suffice for my immediate purpose, +but it is impossible to deny oneself or one's readers the pleasure of a +refreshed recollection of the noble landscape-scene and the masterly +portrait that follow: + +"The Gillmans did not encourage much company or excitation of any sort +round their sage; nevertheless, access to him, if a youth did reverently +wish it, was not difficult. He would stroll about the pleasant garden +with you, sit in the pleasant rooms of the place--perhaps take you to +his own peculiar room, high up, with a rearward view, which was the +chief view of all. A really charming outlook in fine weather. Close at +hand wide sweeps of flowing leafy gardens, their few houses mostly +hidden, the very chimney-pots veiled under blossoming umbrage, flowed +gloriously down hill; gloriously issuing in wide-tufted undulating +plain country, rich in all charms of field and town. Waving blooming +country of the brightest green, dotted all over with handsome villas, +handsome groves crossed by roads and human traffic, here inaudible, or +heard only as a musical hum; and behind all swam, under olive-tinted +haze, the illimitable limitary ocean of London, with its domes and +steeples definite in the sun, big Paul's and the many memories attached +to it hanging high over all. Nowhere of its kind could you see a grander +prospect on a bright summer day, with the set of the air going southward +--southward, and so draping with the city smoke not _you_ but the +city." + +Then comes the invariable final touch, the one dash of black--or green, +shall we call it--without which the master left no picture that had a +human figure in the foreground:-- + +"Here for hours would Coleridge talk concerning all conceivable or +inconceivable things; and liked nothing better than to have an +intelligent, or, failing that, even a silent and patient human +listener. He distinguished himself to all that ever heard him as at +least the most surprising talker extant in this world,--and to some +small minority, by no means to all, as the most excellent." + +Then follows the well-known, wonderfully vivid, cynically pathetic, +sketch of the man:-- + +"The good man--he was now getting old, towards sixty perhaps, and +gave you the idea of a life that had been full of sufferings; a +life heavy-laden, half-vanquished, still swimming painfully in +seas of manifold physical and other bewilderment. Brow and +head were round and of massive weight, but the face was flabby and +irresolute. The deep eyes, of a light hazel, were as full of sorrow as +of inspiration; confused pain looked mildly from them, as in a kind of +mild astonishment. The whole figure and air, good and amiable +otherwise, might be called flabby and irresolute; expressive of +weakness under possibility of strength. He hung loosely on his limbs, +with knees bent, and stooping attitude; in walking he rather shuffled +than decisively stept; and a lady once remarked he never could fix +which side of the gardenwalk would suit him best, but continually +shifted, corkscrew fashion, and kept trying both; a heavy-laden, high- +aspiring, and surely much-suffering man. His voice, naturally soft and +good, had contracted itself into a plaintive snuffle and singsong; he +spoke as if preaching--you could have said preaching earnestly and +almost hopelessly the weightiest things. I still recollect his 'object' +and 'subject,' terms of continual recurrence in the Kantean province; +and how he sang and snuffled them into 'om-m-ject' and 'sum-m-mject,' +with a kind of solemn shake or quaver as he rolled along. [1] No talk +in his century or in any other could be more surprising." + +Such, as he appeared to this half-contemptuous, half-compassionate, +but ever acute observer, was Coleridge at this the zenith of his +influence over the nascent thought of his day. Such to Carlyle +seemed the _manner_ of the deliverance of the oracles; in his +view of their matter, as we all know from an equally well-remembered +passage, his tolerance disappears, and his account here, with all +its racy humour, is almost wholly impatient. Talk, "suffering no +interruption, however reverent," "hastily putting aside all foreign +additions, annotation, or most ingenuous desires for elucidation, as +well-meant superfluities which would never do;" talk "not flowing +anywhither, like a river, but spreading everywhither in inextricable +currents and regurgitations like a lake or sea;" a "confused +unintelligible flood of utterance, threatening to submerge all known +landmarks of thought and drown the world with you"--this, it must be +admitted, is not an easily recognisable description of the Word of +Life. Nor, certainly, does Carlyle's own personal experience of its +preaching and effects--he having heard the preacher talk "with eager +musical energy two stricken hours, his face radiant and moist, and +communicate no meaning whatsoever to any individual of his hearers," +--certain of whom, the narrator for one, "still kept eagerly +listening in hope, while the most had long before given up and formed +(if the room was large enough) humming groups of their own." "He +began anywhere," continues this irresistibly comic sketch; "you put +some question to him, made some suggestive observation; instead of +answering this, or decidedly setting out towards an answer of it, he +would accumulate formidable apparatus, logical swim-bladders, +transcendental life-preservers, and other precautionary and +vehiculatory gear for setting out; perhaps did at last get under way +--but was swiftly solicited, turned aside by the flame of some +radiant new game on this hand or on that into new courses, and ever +into new; and before long into all the universe, where it was +uncertain what game you would catch, or whether any." He +had, indeed, according to the dissatisfied listener, "not the least +talent for explaining this or anything to them; and you swam and +fluttered on the mistiest, wide, unintelligible deluge of things for +most part in a rather profitless uncomfortable manner." And the few +vivid phrases of eulogy which follow seem only to deepen by contrast +the prevailing hue of the picture. The "glorious islets" which were +sometimes seen to "rise out of the haze," the "balmy sunny islets of +the blest and the intelligible, at whose emergence the secondary +humming group would all cease humming and hang breathless upon the +eloquent words, till once your islet got wrapped in the mist again, and +they would recommence humming"--these, it seems to be suggested, but +rarely revealed themselves; but "eloquent, artistically expressive +words you always had; piercing radiances of a most subtle insight came +at intervals; tones of noble pious sympathy recognisable as pious +though strangely coloured, were never wanting long; but, in general, +you could not call this aimless cloud-capt, cloud-bound, lawlessly +meandering discourse, by the name of excellent talk, but only of +surprising.... The moaning sing-song of that theosophico-metaphysical +monotony left in you at last a very dreary feeling." + +It is tolerably clear, I think, that some considerable discount must +be allowed upon the sum of disparagement in this famous criticism. We have +learnt, indeed, to be more on the look-out for the disturbing influences +of temperament in the judgments of this atrabilious observer than was the +case when the _Life of Sterling_ was written, and it is difficult +to doubt that the unfavourable strokes in the above-quoted description +have been unduly multiplied and deepened, partly in the mere +waywardness of a sarcastic humour, and partly perhaps from a less +excusable cause. It is always dangerous to accept one remarkable +talker's view of the characteristics of another; and if this is true of +men who merely compete with each other in the ordinary give-and-take of +the dinner-table epigrammatist and _raconteur,_ the caution is +doubly necessary in the case of two rival prophets--two competing +oracles. There are those among us who hold that the conversation of the +Chelsea sage, in his later years, resembled his own description of the +Highgate philosopher's, in this, at any rate, that it was mightily +intolerant of interruption; and one is apt to suspect that at no time +of his life did Carlyle "understand duologue" much better than +Coleridge. It is probable enough, therefore, that the young lay- +preacher did not quite relish being silenced by the elder, and that his +account of the sermons was coloured by the recollection that his own +remained undelivered. There is an abundance of evidence that the +"glorious islets" emerged far more often from the transcendental haze +than Carlyle would have us suppose. Hazlitt, a bitter assailant of +Coleridge's, and whose caustic remark that "his talk was excellent if +you let him start from no premisses and come to no conclusion" is cited +with approval by Carlyle, has elsewhere spoken of Coleridge as the only +person from whom he ever learned anything, has said of him that though +he talked on for ever you wished him to talk on for ever, that "his +thoughts did not seem to come with labour and effort, but as if borne +on the gusts of genius, and as if the wings of his imagination lifted +him from his feet." And besides this testimony to the eloquence which +Carlyle only but inadequately recognises, one should set for what it is +worth De Quincey's evidence to that consequence of thought which +Carlyle denies altogether. To De Quincey the complaint that Coleridge +wandered in his talk appeared unjust. According to him the great +discourser only "seemed to wander," and he seemed to wander the most +"when in fact his resistance to the wandering instinct was greatest, +viz. when the compass and huge circuit by which his illustrations moved +travelled farthest into remote regions before they began to revolve. +Long before this coming round commenced most people had lost him, and, +naturally enough, supposed that he had lost himself. They continued to +admire the separate beauty of the thoughts, but did not see their +relations to the dominant theme." De Quincey however, declares +positively in the faith of his "long and intimate knowledge of +Coleridge's mind, that logic the most severe was as inalienable from +his modes of thinking as grammar from his language." + +Nor should we omit the testimony of another, a more partial, perhaps, +but even better informed judge. The _Table Talk_, edited by Mr. +Nelson Coleridge, shows how pregnant, how pithy, how full of subtle +observation, and often also of playful humour, could be the talk of +the great discourser in its lighter and more colloquial forms. The +book indeed is, to the thinking of one, at any rate, of its frequent +readers, among the most delightful in the world. But thus speaks its +editor of his uncle's conversation in his more serious moods:-- + +"To pass an entire day with Coleridge was a marvellous change indeed +[from the talk of daily life]. It was a Sabbath past expression, deep +and tranquil and serene. You came to a man who had travelled in many +countries and in critical times; who had seen and felt the world in +most of its ranks and in many of its vicissitudes and weaknesses; one +to whom all literature and art were absolutely subject; and to whom, +with a reasonable allowance as to technical details, all science was, +in a most extraordinary degree, familiar. Throughout a long-drawn +summer's day would this man talk to you in low, equable, but clear +and musical tones concerning things Iranian and divine; marshalling +all history, harmonising all experiment, probing the depths of your +consciousness, and revealing visions of glory and terror to the +imagination; but pouring withal such floods of light upon the mind +that you might for a season, like Paul, become blind in the very act +of conversion. And this he would do without so much as one allusion +to himself, without a word of reflection upon others, save when any +given art fell naturally in the way of his discourse; without one +anecdote that was not proof and illustration of a previous position; +--gratifying no passion, indulging no caprice, but, with a calm +mastery over your soul, leading you onward and onward for ever +through a thousand windings, yet with no pause, to some magnificent +point in which, as in a focus, all the parti-coloured rays of his +discourse should converge in light. In all these he was, in truth, +your teacher and guide; but in a little while you might forget that +he was other than a fellow-student and the companion of your way-- +so playful was his manner, so simple his language, so affectionate the +glance of his eye!" + +Impressive, however, as these displays may have been, it is impossible +to suppose that their direct didactic value as discourses was at +all considerable. Such as it was, moreover, it was confined in all +probability to an extremely select circle of followers. A few +mystics of the type of Maurice, a few eager seekers after truth +like Sterling, may have gathered, or fancied they gathered, distinct +dogmatic instruction from the Highgate oracles; and no doubt, to the +extent of his influence over the former of these disciples, we may +justly credit Coleridge's discourses with having exercised a real if +only a transitory directive effect upon nineteenth-century thought. But +the terms in which his influence is sometimes spoken of appear, as far +as one can judge of the matter at this distance of time, to be greatly +exaggerated. To speak of it in the same way as we are--or were-- +accustomed to speak of the influence of Carlyle, is to subject it to an +altogether inappropriate comparison. It is not merely that Coleridge +founded no recognisable school, for neither did Carlyle. It is that the +former can show absolutely nothing at all resembling that sort of power +which enabled the latter to lay hold upon all the youthful minds of his +time--minds of the most disparate orders and associated with the utmost +diversities of temperament, and detain them in a captivity which, brief +as it may have been in some cases, has in no case failed to leave its +marks behind it. Over a few spirits already prepared to receive them +Coleridge's teachings no doubt exerted power, but he led no soul +captive against its will. There are few middle-aged men of active +intelligence at the present day who can avoid a confession of having +"taken" Carlylism in their youth; but no mental constitutions not +predisposed to it could ever have caught Coleridgism at all. There is +indeed no moral theory of life, there are no maxims of conduct, such as +youth above all things craves for, in Coleridge's teaching. Apart from +the intrinsic difficulties of the task to which he invites his +disciples, it labours under a primary and essential disadvantage of +postponing moral to intellectual liberation. Contrive somehow or other +to attain to just ideas as to the capacities and limitations of the +human consciousness, considered especially in relation to its two +important and eternally distinct functions, the Reason and the +Understanding: and peace of mind shall in due time be added unto you. +That is in effect Coleridge's answer to the inquirer who consults him; +and if the distinction between the Reason and the Understanding were as +obvious as it is obscure to the average unmetaphysical mind, and of a +value as assured for the purpose to which Coleridge applies it as it is +uncertain, the answer would nevertheless send many a would-be disciple +sorrowful away. His natural impulse is to urge the oracle to tell him +whether there be not some one moral attitude which he can wisely and +worthily adopt towards the universe, whatever theory he may form of his +mental relations to it, or without forming any such theory at all. And +it was because Carlyle supplied, or was believed to supply an answer, +such as it was, to this universal question, that his train of +followers, voluntary and involuntary, permanent and temporary, has been +so large. + +It appears to me, therefore, on as careful an examination of +the point as the data admit of, that Coleridge's position in these +latter days of his life has been somewhat mythically exalted by the +generation which succeeded him. There are, I think, distinct traces of +a Coleridgian legend which has only slowly died out. The actual truth I +believe to be that Coleridge's position from 1818 or 1820 till his +death, though one of the greatest eminence, was in no sense one of the +highest, or even of any considerable influence. Fame and honour, in the +fullest measure, were no doubt his: in that matter, indeed, he was only +receiving payment of long-delayed arrears. The poetic school with which +he was, though not with entire accuracy, associated had outlived its +period of contempt and obloquy. In spite of the two quarterlies, the +Tory review hostile, its Whig rival coldly silent, the public had +recognised the high imaginative merit of _Christabel;_ and who +knows but that if the first edition of the _Lyrical Ballads_ had +appeared at this date instead of twenty years before, it would have +obtained a certain number of readers even among landsmen? [2] But over +and above the published works of the poet there were those +extraordinary personal characteristics to which the fame of his works +of course attracted a far larger share than formerly of popular +attention. A remarkable man has more attractive power over the mass of +mankind than the most remarkable of books, and it was because the +report of Coleridge among those who knew him was more stimulating to +public curiosity than even the greatest of his poems, that his +celebrity in these latter years attained such proportions. Wordsworth +said that though "he had seen many men do wonderful things, Coleridge +was the only wonderful man he had ever met," and it was not the doer of +wonderful things but the wonderful man that English society in those +days went out for to see. Seeing would have been enough, but for a +certain number there was hearing too, with the report of it for all; +and it is not surprising that fame of the marvellous discourser should, +in mere virtue of his extraordinary power of improvised speech, his +limitless and untiring mastery of articulate words, have risen to a +height to which writers whose only voice is in their pens can never +hope to attain. + +A reputation of that kind, however, must necessarily perish with its +possessor; and Coleridge's posthumous renown has grown, his place in +English literature has become more assured, if it has not been even +fixed higher, since his death than during his lifetime. This +is, in part no doubt, one among the consequences of those very defects +of character which so unfortunately limited his actual achievements. He +has been credited by faith, as it were, with those famous "unwritten +books" of which he assured Charles Lamb that the titles alone would +fill a volume, and such "popular reputation," in the strict sense of +the word, as he has left behind him, is measured rather by what he was +thought capable of doing than by what he did. By serious students, +however, the real worth of Coleridge will be differently estimated. For +them his peculiar value to English literature is not only undiminished +by the incompleteness of his work; it has been, in a certain sense, +enhanced thereby. Or, perhaps, it would be more strictly accurate to +say that the value could not have existed without the incompleteness. A +Coleridge with the faculty of concentration, and the habit of method +superadded--a Coleridge capable of becoming possessed by any one form +of intellectual energy to the exclusion of all others--might, indeed, +have left behind him a more enduring reputation as a philosopher, and +possibly (although this, for reasons already stated, is, in my own +opinion, extremely doubtful) bequeathed to his countrymen more poetry +destined to live; but, unquestionably, he would never have been able to +render that precise service to modern thought and literature which, in +fact, they owe to him. To have exercised his vivifying and fertilising +influence over the minds of others his intellect was bound to be of the +dispersive order; it was essential that he should "take all knowledge +to be his province," and that that eager, subtle, and penetrative mind +should range as freely as it did over subject after subject of human +interest;--illuminating each of them in turn with those rays of true +critical insight which, amid many bewildering cross-lights and some few +downright _ignes fatui,_ flash forth upon us from all Coleridge's +work. + +Of the personal weaknesses which prevented the just development +of the powers, enough, perhaps, has been incidentally said in the +course of this volume. But, in summing up his history, I shall not, I +trust, be thought to judge the man too harshly in saying that, though +the natural disadvantages of wretched health, almost from boyhood +upward, must, in common fairness, be admitted in partial excuse for his +failure, they do not excuse it altogether. It is difficult not to feel +that Coleridge's character, apart altogether from defects of physical +constitution, was wanting in manliness of fibre. His willingness to +accept assistance at the hands of others is too manifestly displayed +even at the earlier and more robust period of his life. It would be a +mistake, of course, in dealing with a literary man of Coleridge's era, +to apply the same standards as obtain in our own days. Wordsworth, as +we have seen, made no scruple to accept the benevolences of the +Wedgwoods. Southey, the type of independence and self-help, was, for +some years, in receipt of a pension from a private source. But +Coleridge, as Miss Meteyard's disclosures have shown, was at all times +far more willing to depend upon others, and was far less scrupulous +about soliciting their bounty, than was either of his two friends. Had +he shared more of the spirit which made Johnson refuse to owe to the +benevolence of others what Providence had enabled him to do for +himself, it might have been better, no doubt, for the world and for the +work which he did therein. + +But when we consider what that work was, how varied and how wonderful, +it seems idle--nay, it seems ungrateful and ungracious--to speculate +too curiously on what further or other benefits this great intellect +might have conferred upon mankind, had its possessor been endowed with +those qualities of resolution and independence which he lacked. That +Coleridge so often only _shows_ the way, and so seldom guides our +steps along it to the end, is no just ground of complaint. It would be +as unreasonable to complain of a beacon-light that it is not a steam-tug, +and forget in the incompleteness of its separate services the glory of +their number. It is a more reasonable objection that the light itself +is too often liable to obscuration,--that it stands erected upon a rock +too often enshrouded by the mists of its encircling sea. But even this +objection should not too greatly weigh with us. It would be wiser and +better for us to dwell rather upon its splendour and helpfulness in the +hours of its efficacy, to think how vast is then the expanse of waters +which it illuminates, and its radiance how steady and serene. + + +FOOTNOTES + +1. No one who recollects the equally singular manner in which another +most distinguished metaphysician--the late Dean Hansel--was wont to +quaver forth his admirably turned and often highly eloquent phrases of +philosophical exposition, can fail to be reminded of him by the above +description. No two temperaments or histories however could be more +dissimilar. The two philosophers resembled each other in nothing save +the "om-mject" and "sum-mject" of their studies. + +2. The Longmans told Coleridge that the greater part of the first +edition of the Lyrical Ballads had been sold to seafaring men, who, +having heard of the _Ancient Mariner_, took the volume for a naval +song-book. + + + +INDEX + + +Adams, Dr., + +_Aeolian Harp,_ + circumstances under which it was written, + Coleridge's opinion of, + +_Aids to Reflection,_ its popularity, + its value as a spiritual manual, + its inferiority from a literary point of view, + +Allan Bank, + +Allsop, Mr. Thomas, + +_Ancient Mariner,_ + how and when first conceived, + its uniqueness, + Wordsworth's account of its origin + and of his suggestions, + a sublime "pot-boiler," + realistic force of its narrative, + its vividness of imagery, + its wonderful word-pictures, + its evenness of execution, + examples of its consummate art, + its chief characteristics, + +Anecdotes, + +Ball, Sir Alexander, + +Beaumont, Lady, + +Berkeley, + +_Biographia Literaria,_ + its interest, critical and illustrative, + its main value, + its analysis of the principles of poetry, + its examination of Wordsworth's theory, + its contents, + +_Blackwood's Magazine,_ + Coleridge's contributions to, + +Bonaparte, + +_Borderers_ (Wordsworth's), + +Bowles, William Lisle, + +Burke, + sonnet to, + +Byron, + +Calne, Coleridge at, + +_Cambridge Intelligencer _(Flower's), + +Carlyle, description of Coleridge by, + +Carrlyon, Dr., + reminiscences of Coleridge in Germany by, + +_Christabel,_ + Coleridge's opinion of, + its unfinished condition, + the lines on the "spell," + its high place as a work of creative art, + its fragmentary beauties, + the description of Christabel's chamber, + its main idea, + outline of the unfinished parts, + Lamb and Hartley Coleridge on, + its perfection from the metrical point of view, + publication of the second part, + its popularity, + Coleridge's great desire to complete it, + +_Circassian Love Chant_, + its charm of melody, + +Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. + His biographers, + birth and family history, + his boyhood and school days, + early childhood, + death of his father, + goes to Christ's Hospital, + goes to Jesus College, Cambridge, + wins the Browne Gold Medal, + leaves Cambridge suddenly and enlists in the army, + his discharge, + returns to Cambridge, + his meeting with Southey and Sara Fricker (his future wife), + writes the _Fall of Robespierre_ with Southey, + leaves Cambridge, + delivers the Bristol lectures, + marries Sara Fricker at Bristol, + writes the _Aeolian Harp_, + plunges into politics and journalism, + projects the _Watchman_ and goes on a canvassing tour, + preaches Unitarian sermons by the way, + brings out the _Watchman_, + retires to a cottage in Somersetshire with Charles Lloyd, + his meeting with Wordsworth, + cooling of his revolutionary enthusiasm, + his intercourse with Wordsworth, + writes _Osorio_, + his rambles with Wordsworth among the Quantock Hills, + projects the _Lyrical Ballads_, + writes the _Ancient Mariner_, + _Christabel_, + _Love_, + _Kubla Khan_, + undertakes the duties of a Unitarian preacher at Shrewsbury, + accepts an annuity from the two Wedgwoods, + goes to Germany with the Wordsworths, + returns to England after a year's absence, + translates Schiller's _Wallenstein_, + devotes himself again to journalism, + goes to the Lake country, + takes opium as an anodyne, + writes the _Ode to Dejection_, + goes on a tour with Thomas Wedgwood, + visits the Wordsworths at Grasmere, + his illness there, + goes to Malta, + ill effects of his stay there, + becomes Secretary to the Governor of the island, + goes to Italy, + returns to England after two and a half years' absence, + his wretched condition of mind and body, + estrangement from his wife, + domestic unhappiness, + meeting with De Quincey, + pecuniary embarrassments, + his lectures at the Royal Institution, + lives with Wordsworth at Allan Bank, + founds and edits the _Friend_, + delivers lectures on Shakespeare, + returns to journalism, + his necessities, + loses his annuity, + neglect of his family, + successful production of his play _Remorse_, + lectures again at Bristol, + retires to Calne with Mr. Morgan, + more financial troubles, + lives with Dr. Gillman at Highgate, + undergoes medical treatment for the opium habit, + returning health and vigour, + renewed literary activity, + writes the _Biographia Literaria_, + lectures again in London, + more money troubles, + publishes _Aids to Reflection_, + accompanies Wordsworth on a tour up the Rhine, + his declining years, + contemplation of his approaching end, + his death, + +Poet and Thinker. + His early bent towards poetry and metaphysics, + his prose style, + his early poems, their merits and defects, + his sonnets, + Coleridge at his best, + untimely decline of his poetic impulse, + Wordsworth's great influence on him, + Coleridge's mastery of the true ballad manner, + estimate of his poetic work, + comparison with Byron and Wordsworth, + his wonderful power of melody, + his great projects, + his critical powers, + his criticism of Shakespeare, + his philosophy, + his contemplated "Great Work," + his materials for various poems, + his metaphysics and theology, + his discourses, + exaggerated notions of his position and influence, + his "unwritten books," + + Precocious boyhood, + descriptions of him at various times, + his voice, + his conduct as a husband, + religious nature, + revolutionary enthusiasm, + consciousness of his great powers, + generous admiration for the gifts of others, + his womanly softness, + his pride in his personal appearance, + his contempt for money, + his ill-health, + his opium-eating, + his restlessness, + best portrait of him, + his unbusinesslike nature, + sorrows of his life, + his laudanum excesses, + his talk, + his weaknesses, + +Coleridge, Mrs., + +Coleridge, Rev. Derwent, + +Coleridge, Rev. George, + +Coleridge, Hartley, + +Coleridge, Rev. John, + +Coleridge, Luke, + +Coleridge, Nelson, + +Coleridge, Sarah, + +_Coleridge and Opium Eating_ (De Quincey's), + +_Condones ad Populum _(Bristol Lectures), + their warmth of language, + evidence of deep thought and reasoning in, + their crudeness, + +Consulate, Coleridge on the French, + +Cottle, Joseph, + +_Courier, The,_ + +_Dark Ladie,_ + +_Dejection, Ode to,_ + Coleridge's swan song, + its promise, + Coleridge's spiritual and moral losses bewailed in, + stanzas from, + biographical value of, + +De Quincey, + +Descartes, + +_Descriptive Sketches _(Wordsworth's), + +_Devil's Thoughts,_ + +_Early Years and Late Reflections_ (Dr. Carrlyon's), + +_Effusions,_ + +Erasmus, + +_Essays on his own Times,_ + +_Eve of St Agnes_ (Keats's), + +_Excursion_ (Wordsworth's), + +_Fall of Robespierre_, + +_Fears in Solitude_, + +_Fire, Famine and Slaughter_, + +Fox, Letters to, + +France, Coleridge on, + ode to, + +Fricker, Edith, + Mary, + Sara, + +_Friend, The_, + Coleridge's object in starting it, + its short-lived career, + causes of its failure, + compared with the _Spectator_, + +_Frost at Midnight_ (lines), + +Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, + Ode to, + +Germany, Coleridge and Wordsworth in, + +Gibbon, + +Gillman, Mr., + +Green, Mr. J. H., + +Grenville, Lord, + +Greta Hall, description of, + +_Group of Englishmen_ (Miss Meteyard's), + +Harz Mountains, Coleridge's tour through the, + +Hazlitt, + +Hume, + +_Joan of Arc_ (Southey's), Coleridge's contribution to, + +Johnson, Samuel, + +_Juvenile Poems_, + +Kean, + +Keats, Coleridge's meeting with and description of, + +Keswick, + +_Kosciusko_ (Sonnet), + +_Kubla Khan_, 39; a wild dream-poem, + its curious origin, + when written, + +_Lake Poets_ (De Quincey's), + +Lamb, Charles, + +Lamb, Mary, + +_Lay Sermons_, + +"Lear,": Coleridge on, + +Lectures, Coleridge's, + at Bristol, + at the Royal Institution, + on Shakespeare and Milton, + at Flower de Luce Court, + extempore lecture, + +Le Grice, Charles, + +_Liberal, The_, + +_Lines on ascending the Bracken_, + +_Lines to William Wordsworth_, + +_Literary Remains_, + +Lloyd, Charles, + +Locke, + +_Love_, + fascination of melody in, + +Lovell, Robert, + +_Lover's Resolution_, + +Luther, + +_Lyrical Ballads_, + origin of, + Coleridge's contributions to, + appearance of, + anecdote concerning, + +Malta, Coleridge's stay at, + +Maurice, + +Metaphysics and theology; Coleridge's, + +Meteyard, Miss, + +Milton, lectures on Shakespeare and, + +_Monody on the Death of Chatterton_, + +Montagu, Mr. and Mrs., + +Morgan, Mr. John, + +_Morning Post, The_, Coleridge's connection with, + +Nether Stowey, Coleridge at, + +_New Monthly Magazine_, + +_Nightingale_, + +_Omniana_ (Southey's), Coleridge's contribution to, + +Opium, + Coleridge's resort to, + origin of the habit, + De Quincey on, + + +_Pains of Sleep_, + +"Pantisocraey," + +Parry, Coleridge's fellow-student in Germany, + +_Peau de Chagrin_ (Balzac's), + +Philosophy, Coleridge's, + (see _Spiritual Philosophy_) + +_Pilgrimage_ (Purchas's), + +Pitt, + sonnet to, + +Pius VII., Pope, + +_Poems on Various Subjects_, + +_Poetical and Dramatic Works_, + +Poetry and the Fine Arts, Coleridge's lectures on, + +"Polonius," Coleridge's estimate of the character of, + +Poole, Mr. Thomas, + +_Prometheus_, Coleridge's paper on, + +Quantock Hills, Coleridge and Wordsworth among the, + +_Recantation_, + +_Recollections_ (Cottle's), + +_Recollections of a Literary Life_ (Miss Mitford's) + +_Reflections on having left a Place of Retirement_, + +_Religious Musings_, + +_Remorse_, + +Revolution, the French, + +_Robbers_, + +Rome, Coleridge in, + +Rousseau, + +Royal Institution, Coleridge's lectures at the, + +Schiller, + +Schlegel, + +Scott, Sir Walter, + +_Sermons, Lay_, + +Shakespeare, + lectures on, + criticisms on, + +Shakespearianism, German, + +Shelley, + +Sheridan, + +Shrewsbury, Coleridge's preaching in, + +_Sibylline Leaves_, + +Slave Trade, Coleridge's Greek Ode on the, + +_Songs of the Pixies_, + +_Sonnets on Eminent Characters_, + +Sotheby, Mr., + +Southey, + +Southey, Cuthbert, + +Southey, Edith, + +_Spectator_, + +_Spiritual Philosophy_ (Green's), + an exposition of Coleridge's Philosophy, + Coleridge's great fundamental principle, + the reason and the understanding, + will, not thought, the ultimate fact of self-consciousness, + a philosophy of Realism, + philosophy valued by Coleridge mainly as an organon of religion, + growth of the soul, + the idea of God, + idea of the Trinity, + "a guidebook written in hieroglyphics," + +_Statesman's Manual_, + +_Sterling, Life of_ (Carlyle's), + +Sterne, + +Stuart, Mr. Daniel, + +Swinburne's praise of Coleridge's lyrics, + +_Table Talk_, + +Theology and metaphysics, Coleridge's system of, + +Unitarian, Coleridge as a, + +_Visionary Hope_, + +Voltaire, + +_Voyages_ (Shelvocke's), + +_Wallenstein_, Coleridge's translation of, + +Warburton, + +_Watchman_, + +Wedgwood, Josiah, + +Wedgwood, Thomas, + +Wordsworth, + +Wordsworth, Dorothy, + +_Year, Ode to the Departing_, + +_Zapolya_, + + +THE END. + + + +End of Project Gutenberg's English Men of Letters: Coleridge, by H. 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