“It is not worth while now to analyze the papers that first attracted notice to ‘Blackwood’s Magazine,’ by calling Coleridge’s ‘Biographia Literaria’ a most execrable performance, and the amiable, passive, lotus-eating author, a compound of egotism and malignity....”
I think “respectable gentlemen” did “do things thirty years ago (now, say fifty), which they could not do now without dishonor.” Thank Providence for the march of civilization, genius has now a better recognition, and knowledge and taste being more generally disseminated and cultivated, the masses of the reading people, who are now the true judges and regulators of these matters, would not brook it for a moment. In vulgar phrase, it is “played out.” The genius is valued higher than the malignant hack critic.
From what I read, Hazlitt died miserably as he had lived. “Sacked” by a woman beneath him in station, “and to recline upon a wretch whose natural gifts were poor to those of his;”—now one of oblivion’s ghosts.
NOTE No. 2.—COLERIDGE AND PLAGIARISM.
That Coleridge did borrow the language of Shelling is of course indisputable. See that part of the “Biographia Literaria” which treats of the Transcendental Philosophy. But Coleridge plainly, and in a manner that cannot be mistaken, makes over to Shelling anything found in his works that resembles that author. He “regarded truth as a divine ventriloquist. He cared not from whose mouth the sounds proceeded, so that the words were audible and intelligible.” He sought not to take anything from Shelling; on the contrary, he pays him a high tribute, and calls him his “predecessor though contemporary.” He said he did not wish to enter into a rivalry with Shelling for what was so unequivocally his right. ’Twould be honor enough for him (Coleridge) to make the system intelligible to his countrymen. But Coleridge made over everything that resembled, or coincided with Shelling, to the latter, on condition that he should not be charged with intentional plagiarism or ungenerous concealment; this because he could not always with accuracy cite passages, or thoughts, actually derived from Shelling. He was not in a situation to do so, hence he makes this general acknowledgment and proclamation beforehand.
He says, indeed, that he never was able to procure but two of Shelling’s books, besides a small pamphlet against Fichte. But the reason why he could not designate citations and thoughts, is, that he and Shelling had studied in the same schools of philosophy, and had taken about the same path in their course of philosophical reading; they were both aiming at the same thing, and although Shelling has seemingly gotten ahead of Coleridge, they would most likely have arrived at about the same conclusions, had the works of each never been known to the other. In short, the ideas of the two men were so similar, that it must have been perplexingly difficult, if not impossible, for Coleridge to tell whether he derived a particular thought from Shelling, or from his own mind.
NOTE No. 3.—A MARE’S NEST.
In De Quincey’s article entitled “Coleridge and Opium Eating,” in the concluding part, after making some very just observations in relation to the peculiar temperament most liable to the seductive influences, and “the spells lying couchant in opium,” he proceeds to make a very strange assertion concerning the properties of opium being known in Paradise, and—mark the bull—refers to Milton’s Paradise Lost in proof! We quote as follows: “You know the Paradise Lost? And you remember from the eleventh book, in its earlier part, that laudanum already existed in Eden,—nay, that it was used medicinally by an archangel; for, after Michael had purged with ‘euphrasy and rue’ the eyes of Adam, lest he should be unequal to the mere sight of the great visions about to unfold their draperies before him, next he fortifies his fleshly spirits against the affliction of these visions, of which visions the first was death. And how?
‘He from the well of life three drops instilled.’