FOOTNOTES:
[9] In the trial of Horne Tooke in 1794 it was decided by the judges that an adjournment might take place in case of 'physical necessity,' but the only previous case of an adjournment cited was that of Canning (in 1753).
[10] This case was in 1665. It is curious that in the case of Hathaway, in 1702, a precisely similar experiment convinced everybody that the accuser was an impostor; and got him a whipping and a place in the pillory.
COLERIDGE[11]
In the period which intervened between the Great War and the first Reform Bill, there were two centres of intellectual light in England. Jeremy Bentham, in his cheerful old age, reached his eightieth birthday in 1828, still, as he phrased it, codifying like any dragon, solving all problems by the application of his famous formula about the greatest happiness of the greatest number, and adding day by day to the vast piles of manuscript which were to embody the principles of all future legislation. To his hermitage in Westminster were admitted a little group of chosen disciples, the stern political economists, rigid utilitarians, and energetic reformers, some of whom were in the coming years to assume the title of philosophical radicals. Another band of enthusiasts sought a different shrine. They listened to an oracle which taught them that utilitarianism was 'moral anarchy,' political economy a 'solemn humbug,' radicalism the direct road to ruin, and true wisdom only to be found in regions of contemplation which Bentham could never enter—for a reason analogous to that which forbids pachydermatous quadrupeds to soar into the empyrean. We know pretty well what was the manner of man at whose feet these disciples sat. The keenest of contemporary observers has left a picture which must be laid under contribution for every description of Coleridge. Carlyle saw an old man—though in point of actual years he was Bentham's junior by nearly a quarter of a century—with the brow of a philosopher and the eye of a poet, but with the irresolute flabby mouth of a sensuous dreamer of dreams, consuming cups of tea, lukewarm but better than he deserved, or strolling, corkscrew fashion, along both sides of a garden path, unable to make up his mind to either. You put him a question; he replied by accumulating 'formidable apparatus, logical swim-bladders, transcendental life-preservers, and other precautionary and vehiculatory gear for setting out;' but rambled into the universe at large, treated you 'as a mere passive bucket, to be pumped into' (fancy a Carlyle for a passive bucket!), and finally left you 'swimming and fluttering in the mistiest wide unintelligible deluge of things, for the most part in a rather profitless uncomfortable manner.' Yet, at times, we are told, 'balmy sunny islets, islets of the blest and intelligible,' would rise out of the haze; and upon these islets the enthusiastic Sterling and others would try to cast anchor. Had they reached the solid foundation of creation, or had they, like Milton's pilot of the small night-foundered skiff, mistaken some metaphysical Kraken for the permanent framework of things?
That question may be answered dogmatically by any one who pleases. Immovable limits of time and capacity forbid me from attempting to answer it now. My excuse for venturing to say something of Coleridge—certainly one of the most fascinating and most perplexing figures in our literary history—is simply this: I have been forced to investigate with some care the details of his career; and I ought to be able not to answer the question, but to provide a little 'vehiculatory gear' towards answering it. Coleridge's philosophy must of course be judged by considerations extraneous to his personal history. Yet I think, as a professional biographer is in duty bound to think, that philosophy is, more often than philosophers admit, the outcome of personal experience; and Coleridge's singular history may throw some light upon his teaching. Here we meet the hagiologist and the iconoclast, the twin plagues of the humble biographer. The hagiologist burns incense before his idol till it is difficult to distinguish any fixed outline through the clouds of gorgeously-tinted vapour. Coleridge thought himself to have certain failings. His relations fully agreed with him. His worshippers regard these meek confessions as mere illustrations of the good man's humility, and even manage to endow the poet and philosopher with all the homely virtues of the respectable and the solvent. To put forward such claims is to challenge the iconoclast. He, a person endowed by nature with a fine stock of virtuous indignation, has very little trouble in picturing the poet-philosopher as a shambling, unreliable, indolent voluptuary, to whom an action became impossible so soon as it presented itself as a duty, and who, even as a man of genius, must be condemned as unfaithful to his high calling. And so we raise the usual edifying discussion as to the privileges of genius. Do they include superiority to the Ten Commandments? Can you expect a poet to confine himself to one wife? May a man neglect his children because he has written the 'Ancient Mariner' and 'Christabel'?—points of casuistry, of which, with your leave, I will postpone the consideration to a future occasion.
For my purpose it is enough to ascertain the facts. I have not to decide whether Coleridge should receive excommunication or canonisation; whether he deserved to go straight to heaven or to pass a period—and, if so, how long a period—in purgatory. It is difficult to settle such questions satisfactorily. I desiderate an accurate diagnosis, not a judicial sentence. Coleridge sinned and repented. I take note of sin and of repentance as indications of character. I do not pretend to say whether in the eye of Heaven the repentance would be an adequate set-off for the sin. But I premise one apology for anything that may sound iconoclastic, and which I think is worth the consideration of the amiable persons who undertake to rehabilitate soiled reputations. A man's weakness can rarely be overlooked without underestimating his strength. If Coleridge's intellect were, as De Quincey said in his magniloquent way, 'the greatest and most spacious, the subtlest and most comprehensive, that has yet existed among men' (what a philosopher one must be to pronounce such a judgment!) why were the results so small? Because the ethereal soul was chained to a fleshly carcase. To deny this is to force us to assume that what he did was all that he could do. You must either exaggerate his actual achievements beyond all possible limits, or save your belief in his potential achievements by admitting that his intellect never had fair play.
Let us consider the antecedents of the prophet of Highgate Hill. Was there ever a young man fuller of intellectual promise or of personal charm than the youth of twenty-five, who, in 1797, rambled through the Quantocks discussing and composing poetry with Wordsworth? Circumstances apparently unfavourable had only served to stimulate his intellectual growth. Separated from his family in infancy, to become one of the victims of our public school system—ill-fed, ill-nursed, and ill-taught at Christ's Hospital; urged upon the treadmill of a sound classical education by a rigid schoolmaster, he had assimilated with singular aptitude whatever intellectual food had drifted within his reach. He had caught glimpses of high metaphysical secrets; he had peered into the mysteries of medical practice; he had bolted a miscellaneous library whole; he had been infected with poetical enthusiasm by the study of that minute day-star, W. L. Bowles; and he had completed his training by falling desperately in love with the inevitable sister of a schoolfellow. It is a comfort to reflect that the best regulated systems of education break down somewhere. Coleridge, it would have seemed, ran every risk of being driven sheep-like along the dull high road of Latin grammar. Nature had prompted him to leap the fences, to expatiate in the wide fields of intellectual and imaginative pasture, and to derive a keener zest for his nourishment from the knowledge that the indulgence was illegitimate. Cambridge, the mother of poets, received him with the kindness she had so often shown to her children. We—I speak as a Cambridge man—we flogged (or nearly flogged) Milton into republicanism; we disgusted Dryden into an anomalous and monstrous preference for Oxford; we bored Gray till, half stifled with academic dulness, he sought more cheerful surroundings in a country churchyard; we left Byron to the congenial society of his bear; we did nothing for Wordsworth, except, indeed, that we took him to Milton's rooms, and there for once (it must really have done him some good) induced him to take a glass too much; and we, as nearly as possible, converted Coleridge into a heavy dragoon. We ordered him to bow the knee to Euclid, and to Newton's 'Principia,' the only idols whose merits were altogether beyond his powers of appreciation, and by such kindness in disguise induced him to plunge into a precocious breach with the proprieties. A fellowship might have converted him into a solid Church and State don, an oracle of the Combination Room, and a sound judge of port wine. We sternly withheld the temptation. A reformer has to start in life as a rebel. Coleridge sympathised with the rebellious William Frend, who was being banished from Cambridge for excessive liberalism. He offered his youthful incense to Priestley, the 'patriot and saint and sage'—so the young enthusiast called him—who was soon to be expelled by the exuberant loyalty of Birmingham from an ungrateful country. Though never a Jacobin, he became what, in some form or other, a young man ought to become—an enthusiast for the newest lights, a partisan of the ideas struggling to remould the ancient order and raise the aspirations of mankind. The Master of the College shook his reverend head, kindly enough at times, at the lad's vagaries, and forgave him even for that preposterous attempt to become a trooper which never enabled him, with all his subtlety of distinction, to form any clear conception of the difference between a horse's head and its tail. But he could not run in the regular track. He was thrown into the chaotic world to sink or swim by his unassisted abilities. No man had, in some ways, a better floating apparatus. The poetic vein, soon to manifest itself in his best work, was indeed still turbid with the alloy of didactic twaddle. But already he had the versatility, the inherent vitality of intellect, the power of embodying philosophic thoughts in poetic imagery, which made him unrivalled in monologue. He talked better, I am apt to think, with his chum, Charles Lamb, at the 'Cat and Salutation,' than he ever talked to his worshippers at Highgate Hill. A man is at his best before he is recognised. Coleridge's early letters and essays show the fulness and intellectual vigour, without the too elaborate and slightly sanctimonious circumgyrations, of his later effusions. And his genius was such as implied a double portion of the power of making friends, which, with most of us, wanes so lamentably as the years go by. Lamb, his earliest and latest friend, was already devoted to this brilliant schoolfellow; and if Lamb was an easy conquest, men of less conspicuously tender nature were equally attracted. He had only to meet Southey at Oxford to swear at once an eternal friendship—a friendship to be cemented by a regeneration of the world.
Coleridge was to be the Plato of a new society to be founded in the wilds of America. There a short and healthy space of daily toil was to provide all that was necessary for a band of poets and philosophers, too benevolent to care for separate property, and worthy founders of an Arcadia of perfect simplicity, refinement, and equality. As for the Eves of the Paradise, were there not three Miss Frickers? Coleridge repelled for a time the too obvious foreboding that Pantisocracy was but a province of dreamland. Dreamland was his reality. For the demands of butchers and bakers he had still a lordly indifference. He had the voice which could charm even a publisher. The prim and priggish Cottle was at once annexed by Coleridge, and all the natural caution of a tradesman did not withhold him from promising a guinea for every hundred lines to be produced by a still untried new poet. What were one hundred lines to the genius which could turn off an act of a tragedy in a morning, and which soon afterwards could build the shadowy palace of Kubla Khan in a dream? Coleridge was justified, in point of bare prudence, in marrying at once on the prospect. Somehow the poetry did not come so fast as the bills. But Coleridge had other strings to his bow. He set up as a lecturer and journalist. His marvellous eloquence condescended for the nonce to wile promises of subscription even from dealers in tallow; and the philosopher—not without a humorous sense of his own absurdity—became a successful commercial traveller. The newspaper of course collapsed almost on the spot. All the arrangements were absurd, and Coleridge's eloquence proved to be somehow uncongenial to the tallow-dealing interest. But meanwhile, in the course of his journey, Coleridge had incidentally and, as it were, by the mere side glance of his eye, swept up Charles Lloyd, son of a rich banker, who, fascinated and enthralled, left the bank to become an inmate of his teacher's house, and, no doubt, a contributor to its expenses. Poole, a most public-spirited and intelligent man, offered him an asylum at Nether Stowey. The Unitarians, to whom he more or less belonged, were ready to open their pulpit to a preacher whose eloquence promised to rival even the most splendid traditions of the age of Leighton and Jeremy Taylor.
Hazlitt, not yet soured and savage, heard Coleridge preach in 1798; and tells us in true Hazlittian style how his voice rose like a storm of rich distilled perfumes; how he launched into his subject like an eagle dallying with the wind; how, in brief, poetry and philosophy had met together, truth and genius had embraced under the eye and with the sanction of reason. The Unitarian firmament was too cramped for this brilliant meteor; the philosophy expounded from the pulpits seemed to him meagre and rigid; and, while hesitating, he received an offer from the generous Wedgwoods, anxious to spend some part of their wealth in the patronage of genius.
Rumours had reached England by this time that a great intellectual light had arisen in Germany. The Wedgwoods gave Coleridge a modest annuity, unfettered (as I can now say) by any condition whatever, a fact which makes the subsequent withdrawal a harsher measure than has been supposed. Coleridge resolved to go to Germany, catch the sacred fire of the Kantian philosophy, and return to England to regenerate the mind of his countrymen. He started in September 1798, when he was just twenty-six, in company with the friend who alone could be compared to him in intellectual power. Wordsworth had been attracted, as Lamb and Southey had been attracted before him. Coleridge and Wordsworth had discussed the principles of their common art; and Coleridge had applied them in those wonderful poems, the 'Ancient Mariner' and 'Christabel' (the first part), which were to be but the prologue to a fuller utterance; a wonderful prologue, for, though followed by nothing, it remained unique and inimitable. Coleridge was not yet déterré, as Pope said of Johnson; the ordinary critics had only a passing smile or sneer for the little clique which published its obscure utterances in a provincial town. Monthly and critical reviewers—the arbiters of taste—would have been astonished to hear that Coleridge and Wordsworth and Lamb and Southey would soon stand in the very front ranks of English literature; and he must have a clearer conscience than I who would cast a stone at critics for not at once detecting the first germs of rising genius. But, as ex post facto prophets, we are able to see that Coleridge already had not only given proofs of astonishing power, but had won what was even more valuable, the true sympathy and cordial affection of young men who were the distinct leaders of the next generation. Even material support was not wanting from such men as Poole and Wedgwood, sufficient to ensure a fair start for the little band of prophets. We should have been justified in foretelling, with unusual confidence, a career of surpassing brilliancy for the youth, of whom it seemed only questionable whether he would choose to be a second Bacon or a second Milton.
And if, at that time, any one could have shown us the same Coleridge at a distance of eighteen years, the worn, depressed, prematurely aged man who took up his abode with Gillman in 1816, we should have been shocked, and yet, perhaps, have been able to utter our complacent 'I told you so.' What so far had been the achievements of the most brilliant genius of the generation: a man not only of surpassing ability, but of surpassing facility of utterance; a man whom to set going at any moment was to unlock a perpetually flowing fountain of abounding eloquence? A few newspaper articles and some courses of lectures, he said in 1817, constituted his whole publicity. It may be added that he had jotted down on the margins of books enough detached thoughts to have made some volumes of admirable reflections. But he had achieved nothing to suggest concentrated thought or sustained labour. In a shorter period Scott poured out the whole of the Waverley Novels, besides discharging official duties, and writing a number of reviews and miscellaneous works. I say nothing as to the quality. I am simply thinking of the amount of work; and Coleridge's work cost little labour, for his power of improvisation was among his most marvellous faculties. Why, then, was the work so limited in quantity? The internal facts are sufficiently significant. After his return from Germany in the autumn of 1799, he wrote some articles which certainly proved that his intellect was in full vigour, translated 'Wallenstein,' and then, in 1800, retired with his family to Keswick. Here at once ominous symptoms begin to show themselves. A strange disquiet is betrayed in his letters; there are painful complaints of ill-health; his poetic inspiration breathes its last in the 'Ode to Dejection.' He sought in vain to distract painful thought by metaphysical abstractions; he rambled off in 1804 to spend two years and a half in Malta and Italy. Returning to England, he tried lecturing at the Royal Institution, and then settled at Grasmere—separated by fifteen miles of mountain roads from his wife—and repeated his 'Watchman' experiment by writing the 'Friend.' The youthful buoyancy, even flippancy, has departed, though it shows far riper thought and richer intellectual stores. But weariness of spirit marks every page; the long sentences somehow suggest a succession of stifled groans; as the enterprise proceeds, it can only be kept up by introducing any irrelevant matter that may be on hand—such as old letters from Germany which happened to be in his portfolio, and an extravagant panegyric upon his patron at Malta, Sir Alexander Ball.
The 'Friend' soon falls dead, and Coleridge drifts back to London. There he makes efforts, pathetic in their impotence, to keep his head above water. He tries journalism again, but without the occasional triumphs which had formerly atoned for his irregularity. He lectures, and is heard with an interest which shows that, in spite of all impediments, his marvellous powers have at least roused the curiosity of all who claim to have an intellectual taste. He has a gleam of success, too, from the production of his old tragedy, 'Remorse,' written in the days of early vigour. But some undertow seems to be sucking him back, so that he can never get his feet planted on dry land. He retires to Bristol, and thence to Calne, where he seems to be sinking into utter obscurity. He has almost passed out of the knowledge of his friends, when a last despairing effort lands him at Highgate, and there a rather singular transformation, it may seem at first sight, enables him to become the oracle of youthful aspiration, wisdom, and virtue. Painfully, and imperfectly with their aid, he gathers together some fragments of actual achievement—enough to justify a great, but a most tantalising reputation.
What was the secret of this painful history? Briefly, it was opium. Coleridge said so himself, and all his biographers have stated the facts. Without this statement the whole story would be unintelligible, and we could have done justice neither to Coleridge's intellectual powers nor even to some of his virtues. To tell the story of Coleridge without the opium is to tell the story of Hamlet without mentioning the Ghost. The tragedy of a life would become a mere string of incoherent accidents. Nor are the facts doubtful. Coleridge, I fear, composed, or invented, for the benefit of Gillman, a certain picturesque 'Kendal black drop'—a treacherous nostrum, it is suggested, which gave him relief in his sufferings at Keswick, and overpowered his will before he had recognised its nature. The truth is, as can be abundantly proved by his letters at the time, that he was taking laudanum in large quantities in 1796, that is when he was just twenty-four, under the pressure of illness, but certainly well knowing what he was taking. It was at Keswick, not that he first indulged, but that he first became aware of his almost hopeless enslavement.
After reading many painfully conclusive proofs of this passion, I confess that I think it less remarkable that his demoralisation in this respect seemed to be complete about 1814, than that he succeeded, under Gillman's care, in so far breaking off the habit as to make a certain salvage from the wreck. I simply take note of these facts, and leave anybody who pleases to do the moralising; but I am forced to add a few words upon another topic, to which his apologists have resorted in order to extenuate the opium-eating. Briefly, it has been attempted to save his character by abusing his wife. Undoubtedly, as the recently published Coleorton papers prove, there was a complete want of sympathy. The same documents show that it was not, as had been generally supposed, a case of gradual drifting apart. Proposals for a regular separation had been made by the time of Coleridge's return from Malta. Coleridge's apologists have said that Mrs. Coleridge was one of Iago's women, born 'to suckle fools and chronicle small beer,' and quite unable to appreciate Kantian metaphysics, or even 'Christabel.' A very doubtful legend has been put about, that she once said, 'Get oop, Coleridge' (a remark for which one can conceive a sufficient justification), and no man can be expected to care for a woman who says 'Get oop,' or for her children. From letters of hers which I have seen, I am inclined to think that Mrs. Coleridge must really have been a very sensible woman, who worked hard to educate her own children and the children of her sister, Mrs. Southey, in French and Italian, and who could express herself in remarkably good English. She was no doubt inappreciative of a genius which could not be set to bread-winning. And moreover, when a man has an ecstatic admiration for another woman, it is not likely to make his relations to his wife more pleasant. To speak of all this as a moral excuse for Coleridge is to my mind unmanly. If a man of genius condescends to marry a woman, and be the father of her children, he must incur responsibilities. The fact that he leaves her, as Coleridge did, his small fixed income, the balance of her expenses to be made up by his brother-in-law and other connections, is so far to his credit, but does not excuse him for a neglect of those duties, not to be measured in pounds, shillings, and pence, which a husband and father owes to an innocent woman and three small children. Coleridge's position was no doubt difficult, but the mode in which he solved the difficulty is a proof that opium-eating is inconsistent with certain homely duties.
An experienced person has said, 'Do not marry a man of genius.' I have no personal interest in that question, nor will I express any opinion upon it, but one is inclined to say, Don't be his brother-in-law, or his publisher, or his editor, or anything that is his if you care twopence—it is probably an excessive valuation—for the opinion of posthumous critics.
But, again, I would avoid moralising. I only ask what is the true inference as to Coleridge's character. And that consideration may bring us back to less painful reflections. It is preposterous to maintain the thesis that Coleridge was the kind of person to be held up as a pattern to young men about to marry. Opium had ruined the power of will, never very strong, and any capacity he may have had—and his versatility was perhaps incompatible with any great capacity—for concentration on a great task. The consequences of such indulgence had ruined his home life, and all but ruined his intellectual career. But there is also this to be said, that at his worst Coleridge was both loved and eminently lovable. His failings excited far more compassion than indignation. The 'pity of it' expresses the sentiment of all eye-witnesses. He was always full of kindly feelings, never soured into cynicism. The strange power of fascination which he had shown in his poetic youth never deserted him. As De Quincey has said: 'Beyond all men who ever perhaps have lived, he found means to engage a constant succession of most faithful friends. He received the services of sisters, brothers, daughters, sons, from the hands of strangers attracted to him by no possible impulses but those of reverence for his intellect and love for his gracious nature. Perpetual relays were laid along his path in life of zealous and judicious supporters.' Whenever Coleridge was at his lowest, some one was ready to help him. Poole, and Lloyd, and Wedgwood, and De Quincey, had come forward in their turn. Through the dismal years of degradation which preceded his final refuge at Gillman's, the faithful Morgans had made him a home, tried to break off his bad habits, and enabled him to carry on the almost hopeless struggle. When Morgan himself became bankrupt, it is pleasant to know that Coleridge, among whose faults pecuniary meanness had no place, gave what he could—and far more than he could really spare—to help his old friend. When he delivered his lectures or poured out an amazing monologue at Lamb's suppers, or in Godwin's shop, young men, at the age of hero-worship, were already prepared not only to wonder at the intellectual display, but to feel their hearts warmed by the real goodness shining through the shattered and imperfectly transparent vessel. Coleridge's letters may reveal some part of this charm, though some part, too, of the drawback. His long involved sentences; compared by himself to a Surinam toad with a brood of little toads escaping from his back, wind about in something between a spoken reverie and a sympathetic effusion of confidential confessions. When they touch the practical, e.g. publishers' accounts, they are apt to become hopelessly unintelligible. When they expound a vast scheme for a magnum opus, or one of the various magna opera which at any time for thirty years were just ready to issue from the press, as soon as a few pages were transcribed, we perceive, after a moment, that they are not the fictions of the begging-letter writer, but a kind of secretion, spontaneously and unconsciously evolved to pacify the stings of remorse. There are moments when he is querulous, but we must forgive them to the man who had been hopelessly distanced in popular fame by his inferiors; whose attempts at public utterance had utterly collapsed; whose 'Wallenstein' still encumbered his publisher's shelves; whose poetical copyrights had been deliberately valued at nil; and whose name was only mentioned in the chief reviews as a superlative for wilful eccentricity and absurdity. And then, at every turn, we come upon frequent gleams, not only of subtle thought and imaginative expression, but of shrewd common-sense, and even at times of a genuine humour, which seems to imply that Lamb was partly serious when he said that Coleridge had so much 'f-f-fun' in him. After reading many of the letters, which still remain unpublished, I may say that it is my own conviction that a life of Coleridge may still be put together by some judicious writer, who should take Boswell rather than the 'Acta Sanctorum' for his model, which would be as interesting as the great 'Confessions,' which should by turns remind us of Augustine, of Montaigne, and of Rousseau, and sometimes, too, of the inimitable Pepys or Boswell himself; which should show the blending of the many elements of a most complex character and a most versatile and opulent intellect; which should often call forth wonder, and smiles, and sighs, and indignation smothered by pity, in one of those unique combinations which it would take a Shakespeare to portray and act, and defy the skill of a psychologist to define.
Only a faint indication of this is to be found in Coleridge's 'Apologia,' or, as he called it, his 'Biographia Literaria,' of which I must now say a word. It was written at his very nadir, and published just after he had reached his asylum at Highgate. In this sense it has a special biographical value, though its statements, coloured by the illusions to which he was then specially subject, have passed muster too easily with his biographers. Its aim is chiefly to protest against the neglect of the public and the dispensers of patronage. Such complaints generally remind me of a rifleman complaining that the target persists in keeping out of the line of fire. But if we must pardon something to a man so grievously tried for endeavouring to shift a part of the responsibility upon other shoulders than his own, we must be upon our guard against accepting censures which involve injustice to others. Nothing but Coleridge's strange illusions could be an apology, for example, for his complaints that the Ministry had not rewarded a writer whose greatest successes had been scornful denunciations of their great leader, Pitt. The book, of course, is put together with a pitchfork. It is without form or proportion, and is finally eked out with a batch of the old letters from Germany which he had already used in the 'Friend,' and apparently kept as a last resource to stop the mouths of printers.
Now it is remarkable that even at this time, when his demoralisation had gone furthest, he could still pour out many pages of criticism, quite irrelevant to the professed purpose of the book, and yet such as was beyond and above the range of any living contemporary. Coleridge at his worst lost the power of finishing and concentrating—of which he had never had very much—but not the power of discursive reflection. He must be compared not to a tree, which has lost its vital fibre, but to a vine deprived of its props, which, though most of its fruit is crushed and wasted, can yet produce grapes with the full bloom of what might have been a superlative vintage. But there is one fact of the 'Biographia' for which the apology of illusion is more requisite even than for his misstatements of fact. Coleridge has often been accused of plagiarism. I do not believe that he stole his Shakespeare criticism from Schlegel, and, partly at least, for the reason which would induce me to acquit a supposed thief of having stolen a pair of breeches from a wild Highlandman. But it is undeniable that Coleridge was guilty of a serious theft of metaphysical wares. The only excuse suggested is that the theft was too certain of exposure to be perpetrated. But as it certainly was perpetrated, this can only be an apology for the motive. The simple fact is that part of his scheme was to establish his claims to be a great metaphysician. But it takes much trouble and some thought to put together what looks like a chain of à priori demonstration of abstract principles. Coleridge, therefore, persuaded himself that he had really anticipated Schelling's thoughts and might justifiably appropriate Schelling's words. He threw out a few phrases about 'genial coincidence'—perhaps the happiest circumlocution ever devised for what Pistol called 'conveying'—and adopted Schelling in the lump. When he had come to an end of Schelling's guidance, he proceeded—with an infantile simplicity which disarms indignation—to write a solemn complimentary letter from himself to himself, pointing out that the public would have had enough of the discussion, and 'Dear C.' politely agreed to drop the subject, with proper compliments to his 'affectionate, etc.'
And now I come to the very difficult task of indicating, as briefly as I can, the bearing of these remarks upon Coleridge's multifarious activity. It is not possible to sum up in a few phrases the characteristics of a man who wrote upon metaphysics, theology, morals, politics, and literary criticism; who made a deep impression in all the departments of thought; whose utterances are scattered up and down in fragmentary treatises, in complex arguments which generally break off in the middle, and in miscellaneous jottings upon the margins of books; whose opinions have been differently interpreted by different disciples, and have in great part to be inferred from his comments upon other writers, and can only be intelligible when we have settled what those writers meant, and what he took them to mean; who frequently changed his mind, and who certainly appears, to thinkers of a different order, to add obscurity even to subjects which are necessarily obscure. Nor is the difficulty diminished when, as in my case, the commentator belongs to what must be called the antagonistic school, and is even most properly to be described as a thorough Philistine who is dull enough to glory in his Philistinism. All that I shall attempt is to select a certain aspect of the Coleridgian impulse, and to say what impression it makes upon a radically prosaic mind.
The brilliant Coleridge of Nether Stowey, the buoyant young poet-philosopher who had not been to Germany, was still a curious compound of imperfectly fused elements. His Liberalism had led him to the Unitarianism of Priestley and the associative philosophy of Hartley. But he had also dipped into Plotinus and into some of the mystical writers who represent the very opposite pole of speculation. The first doctrine was imposed upon him from without, the other was that which was really congenial to his temperament. For Coleridge was, above all, essentially and intrinsically a poet. The first genuine manifestations of his genius are the poems which he wrote before he was twenty-six. The germ of all Coleridge's utterances may be found—by a little ingenuity—in the 'Ancient Mariner.' For what is the secret of the strange charm of that unique achievement? I do not speak of what may be called its purely literary merits—the melody of versification, the command of language, the vividness of the descriptive passages, and so forth—I leave such points to critics of finer perception and a greater command of superlatives. But part, at least, of the secret is the ease with which Coleridge moves in a world of which the machinery (as the old critics called it) is supplied by the mystic philosopher. Milton, as Penseroso, implores
The spirit of Plato to unfold,
What worlds or what vast systems hold
The spirit of man that hath forsook
Her mansion in this fleshy nook,
And of those demons that are found
In fire, air, flood, and underground,
Whose powers have a true consent
With planet and with element.
If such a man fell asleep in his 'high lonely tower' his dreams would present to him in sensuous imagery the very world in which the strange history of the 'Ancient Mariner' was transacted. It is a world in which both animated things, and stones, and brooks, and clouds, and plants are moved by spiritual agency; in which, as he would put it, the veil of the senses is nothing but a symbolism everywhere telling of unseen and supernatural forces. What we call the solid and the substantial becomes a dream; and the dream is the true underlying reality. The difference between such poetry, and the poetry of Pope, or even of Gray, or Goldsmith, or Cowper—poetry which is the direct utterance of a string of moral, political, or religious reflections—implies a literary revolution. Coleridge, even more distinctly than Wordsworth, represented a deliberate rejection of the canons of the preceding school; for, if Wordsworth's philosophy differed from that of Pope, he still taught by direct exposition instead of the presentation of sensuous symbolism. The distinction might be illustrated by the ingenious criticism of Mrs. Barbauld, who told Coleridge that the 'Ancient Mariner' had two faults—it was improbable and had no moral. Coleridge owned the improbability, but replied to the other stricture that it had too much moral, for that it ought to have had no more than a story in the 'Arabian Nights.' Indeed, the moral, which would apparently be that people who sympathise with a man who shoots an albatross will die in prolonged torture of thirst, is open to obvious objections.
Coleridge's poetical impulse died early; perhaps, as De Quincey said, it was killed by the opium; or as Coleridge said himself, that his afflictions had suspended what nature gave him at his birth,
His shaping spirit of imagination.
So that his only plan was
From his own nature all the natural man,
By abstruse research to steal,
and partly, too, I should guess, for the reason that this strange mystic world in which he was at home was so remote from all ordinary experience that it failed even to provide an efficient symbolism for his deepest thoughts, and could only be accessible in the singular glow and fervour of youthful inspiration. The domestic anxieties, the pains of ill-health, the depression produced by opium, were a heavy clog upon an imagination which should try to soar into vast aerial regions. But it may be doubtful whether this peculiar vein of imagination, opened in the 'Ancient Mariner' and 'Christabel,' could in any case have been worked much further.
At any rate, Coleridge, as his imaginative impulse flagged, passed into the reflective stage; and, as was natural, his mind dwelt much upon those principles of art which he had already discussed with Wordsworth in his creative period. In saying that Coleridge was primarily a poet, I did not mean to intimate that he was not also a subtle dialectician. There is no real incompatibility between the two faculties. A poetic literature which includes Shakespeare in the past and Browning in the present is of itself a sufficient proof that the keenest and most active logical faculty may be combined with the truest poetical imagination. Coleridge's peculiar service to English criticism consisted, indeed, in a great measure, in a clear appreciation of the true relation between the faculties, a relation, I think, which he never quite managed to express clearly. Poetry, as he says, is properly opposed not to prose but to science. Its aim, he infers, is not to establish truth but to communicate pleasure. The poet presents us with the concrete symbol; the man of science endeavours to analyse and abstract the laws embodied. Shakespeare was certainly not a psychologist in the sense in which Professor Bain is a psychologist. He does not state what are our ultimate faculties, or how they act and react, and determine our conduct; but, so far as he creates typical characters, he gives concrete psychology, or presents the problems upon which psychology has to operate. Therefore, if poetry, as Coleridge says after Milton, should be simple, sensuous, passionate, instead of systematic, abstract, and emotionless, like speculative reasoning, it is not to be inferred that the poet should be positively unphilosophical, nor is he the better, as some recent critics appear to have discovered, for merely appealing to the senses as being without thoughts, or, in simpler words, a mere animal. The loftiest poet and the loftiest philosopher deal with the same subject-matter, the great problems of the world and of human life, though one presents the symbolism and the other unravels the logical connection of the abstract conceptions.
Coleridge, having practised, proceeded to preach. That a poet should also be a good critic is no more surprising than that any man should speak well on the art of which he is master. Our best critics of poetry, at least, from Dryden to Matthew Arnold, have been (to invert a famous maxim) poets who have succeeded. Coleridge's specific merit was not, as I think, that he laid down any scientific theory. I don't believe that any such theory has as yet any existence except in embryo. He was something almost unique in this as in his poetry, first because his criticism (so far as it was really excellent) was the criticism of love, the criticism of a man who combined the first simple impulse of admiration with the power of explaining why he admired; and secondly, and as a result, because he placed himself at the right point of view; because, to put it briefly, he was the first great writer who criticised poetry as poetry, and not as science. The preceding generation had asked, as Mrs. Barbauld asked: 'What is the moral?' Has 'Othello' a moral catastrophe? What does 'Paradise Lost' prove? Are the principles of Pope's 'Essay on Man' philosophical? or is Goldsmith's 'Deserted Village' a sound piece of political economy? The reply embodied in Coleridge's admirable criticisms, especially of Shakespeare, was that this implied a total misconception of the relations of poetry to philosophy. The 'moral' of a poem is not this or that proposition tagged to it or deducible from it, moral or otherwise; but the total effect of the stimulus to the imagination and affections, or what Coleridge would call its dynamic effect. That will, no doubt, depend partly upon the philosophy assumed in it; but has no common ground with the merits of a demonstration in Euclid or Spinoza. It is this adoption of a really new method which makes us feel, when we compare Coleridge, not only with the critics of a past generation, but even with very able and acute writers such as Jeffrey or Hazlitt, who were his contemporaries, that we are in a freer and larger atmosphere, and are in contact with deeper principles. It raises another question, for it leads to Coleridge's most conscious aim. Nothing is easier than to put the proper label on a poet—to call him 'romantic,' or 'classical,' and so forth; and then, if he has a predecessor of like principles, to explain him by the likeness, and if he represents a change of principles, to make the change explain itself by calling it a reaction. The method is delightfully simple, and I can use the words as easily as my neighbours. The only thing I find difficult is to look wise when I use them, or to fancy that I give an explanation because I have adopted a classification. Coleridge, both in poetry and philosophy, conceived himself to be one of the leaders of such a reaction. He proposed to abolish the wicked, mechanical, infidel, prosaic eighteenth century and go back to the seventeenth. I do not believe in the possibility or the desirability of any such reaction. I prefer my own grandfathers to their grandfathers, and myself—including you and me—to my grandfathers. I am quite sure that, if I did not, I could not make time run backwards. We are far enough off to be just to the maligned eighteenth century, and to keep all our uncharitableness for our contemporaries—it may do them some good. I would never abuse the century which loved common-sense and freedom of speech, and hated humbug and mystery; the century in which first sprang to life most of the social and intellectual movements which are still the best hope of our own; in which science and history and invention first took their modern shape; the century of David Hume, and Adam Smith, and Gibbon, and Burke, and Johnson, and Fielding, and many old friends to whom I aver incalculable gratitude; but I admit that, like other centuries, it had its faults. It was, no doubt, unpoetical at its close—almost as unpoetical as the latter half of the nineteenth; and somehow it had fallen into that queer blunder of judging poetry by the canons of science. The old symbolism of an earlier generation had faded, and for Pagan or Christian imagery we had frigid personifications, such even as Coleridge quotes from some prize poem: 'Inoculation, heavenly maid!' a deity who could be only adored in a rhymed medical treatise. And Coleridge's charge against the philosophy of the time was really identical with his charge against the poetry.
Poetry, without the mystic or spiritual element, meant Darwin's 'Botanic Garden'—an ice-palace, as he called it, a heap of fine phrases and sham personifications. Take the same element from theology, and you have Paley's 'Evidences;' from morals, and the residuum is Bentham's utilitarianism. Coleridge's nomenclature expressed this, in a fashion. He was fond of saying that all men were born Aristotelians or Platonists: Platonists, if, in his favourite distinction, the reason and the imagination dominated in them, and Aristotelians, if they had only the understanding, the almost vulpine cunning, which was shared even by the lower animals, which meant prudence in morality, reliance upon mere external evidence in theology, and pure expediency in politics. How the Aristotelians had come to rule the world ever since the opening of the eighteenth century is a question which, so far as I know, he never answered. But the effect of their dominion was equally to dethrone reason as to asphyxiate imagination. The two were allies, if not an incarnation of the same faculty. Inversely the Benthamites, till Mill was converted by Wordsworth, regarded poetry as equivalent to mere tintinnabulation and lying, or, as Carlyle's friend put it, the 'prodooction of a rude age.' It was as much in his character of poet as of philosopher that Coleridge hated political economy, the favourite science of the Benthamites; for, according to him, it was an illustration of their destructive method. The economist deals with mere barren abstractions, and then misapplies them to the concrete organism, the life of which, according to the common metaphor, has been destroyed by his dissecting knife. Coleridge goes too far in speaking as if analysis were in itself a mischievous instead of an important process, much as Wordsworth thought that every man of science was ready to botanise on his mother's grave. But, on the other hand, the clear conviction that a society could only be explained as an organic and continuous whole enables him to point out very distinctly the limits of the opposite school. One indication of this contrast may be found in Coleridge's theory of Church and State. It is curious that Mill, in his essay upon Coleridge, especially admires him for taking into account the historical element in which Bentham was deficient. It is curious because it is remarkable that the leader of a school which boasted specially of resting upon experience, should admit that it was weak precisely in not appreciating the historical method on which surely experience should be founded. It seems almost as if the antagonists had changed weapons like the duellists in 'Hamlet.' The à priori thinker rests upon experience, and the empiricist upon a really à priori method.
The ambiguity indicates Coleridge's peculiar position towards the opposite school. He regards society as an organism, a something which has grown through long centuries, and therefore to be studied in its vital principle, not to be analysed into a mere mechanism for distributing certain lumps of happiness. In doing so he was saying what had been said by Burke, whose wisdom he fully appreciated and whose real consistency he recognised. To my mind, indeed, Burke as a political philosopher was far greater than Coleridge. But Burke hated the metaphysics in which Coleridge delighted, and therefore with him we seem at best to come upon blank prejudice, or prescription, as the ultimate ground of political science. Coleridge feels the necessity of connecting his organic principles with some genuine philosophical principle, and Mill admits that Conservatism in his treatment was something very superior to the mere brute prejudice to which Eldon and Castlereagh appealed, and which was used as a bludgeon by 'The Quarterly Review.' Unluckily it is here, too, that we find the weakness of Coleridge's character. He tried to put together his views at a time when his mind had been hopelessly enervated; when he could guess and beat about a principle, but could never get it fairly stated or see its full bearings. He is struggling for utterance, still clinging to the belief that he can elaborate a system, but never getting beyond prolegomena and fruitful hints. He says that to study politics with benefit we must try to elaborate the 'idea' of Church and State, and the 'idea,' as he explains, is identical with what scientific people call a law. But how the law or laws of an organism are to be determined by some transcendental principle overruling and independent of experiences, is just the point which remains inexplicable. He seems to appreciate what we now call the historic method. He uses the sacred phrase 'evolution,' which is simply the general formula of which the historic method is a special application. But we find that by evolution he means some strange process suggestive of his old mystical employment, and even at times talks of heptads and pentads and the 'adorable tetractys,' which is the same with the Trinity; and connects chemical laws of oxygen and hydrogen gas with the logical formulæ about prothesis, and antithesis, and mesothesis. To state the theory of evolution in verifiable and scientific terms was reserved for Darwin; when we meet it in Coleridge we seem to be going back to Pythagoras; and yet it is the same thought which is struggling for an utterance in singular and bewildering terms, and moreover it was just the theory which Mill required.
But, to come to a conclusion, though I cannot think that Coleridge ever worked with his mind clear, or was, indeed, capable of the necessary concentration and steadiness of thought by which alone philosophical achievements are possible; though I hold, again, that if he had succeeded he would have found that he was not so much refuting his opponents as supplying a necessary complement to their teaching, I can still believe that he saw more clearly than any of his contemporaries what were the vital issues; that in his detached and desultory and inconsistent fashion he was stirring the thoughts which were to occupy his successors; and that a detailed examination would show in how many directions a certain Coleridgian leaven is working in later fermentations.
Besides the able and zealous disciples who acknowledged his leadership, we may find many affinities in Carlyle's masculine if narrow teaching; or again, in a school which diverged in a very opposite direction, for the theory of Church authority sanctioned by the Oxford disciples of Cardinal Newman is, in spite of its different result, closely allied to Coleridge's; while the modern Hegelians—though they regard him as a superficial dabbler—must admit that he rendered the service (of doubtful value, perhaps) of infecting English thought with the virus of German metaphysics, and will perhaps admit that, in principle, he anticipated some of their most cogent criticisms of the common enemy. Coleridge never constructed a system. If a philosophy, or its creator, is to be judged by the systematic characters, Coleridge must take a very low place. But when we think what philosophical systems have so far been; what flimsy and air-built bubbles in the eyes of the next generation; how often we desire, even in the case of the greatest men, that the one vital idea (there is seldom so much as one!) could be preserved, and the pretentious structure in which it is involved permitted once for all to burst; we may think that another criterion is admissible; that a man's work may be judged by the stimulus given to reflection, even if given in so intricate a muddle and such fragmentary utterances that its disciples themselves are hopelessly unable to present it in an orderly form. Upon that ground, Coleridge's rank will be a very high one, although, when all is said, the history, both of the man and the thinker, will always be a sad one—the saddest in some sense that we can read, for it is the history of early promise blighted and vast powers all but running hopelessly to waste.