He had studied metaphysics and philosophy for years, and not having “shrank from the toil of thinking,” he must have evolved much original matter; being a man, as De Quincey says, of “most original genius.” Shelling no doubt had gotten ahead of him in publication, but Coleridge had nevertheless undoubtedly thought out the transcendental system before meeting with the works of Shelling. He says himself emphatically, that “all the fundamental ideas were born and matured in my own mind before I ever saw a page of the German philosopher.” However, Coleridge says of the whole system of philosophy—the Dynamic System, as I understand the matter—“that it is his conviction that it is no other than the system of Pythagoras and Plato revived and purified from impure mixtures.”
[The quotations in the above note are from memory, and though not given as exact, they carry the idea intended.]
NOTE No. 5.—ON DE QUINCEY’S STYLE OF WRITING.
As to De Quincey’s style, I think it may be summarized about thus:
Fine writing. Afflicted with ridiculous hyperbole. Too discursive. In his narrative pieces he is too rambling and digressive. I have read but one article of those classed under the title of Literary Reminiscences, namely, the one on Coleridge; it does well enough, but I have read other narrative pieces having the faults mentioned. But then his writings are nearly all of a narrative nature. However, the faults above named are not special to his narrative pieces only—they are general defects in his style. In his shorter pieces, such as his article on Wordsworth’s poetry, on Shelley, and on Hazlitt, and likely some others of the same series which I have not yet read, he is interesting and sufficiently to the point. But in his essay on the works of Walter Savage Landor, is he not a little too inflated, and does he not run his ironical style into the ground? His “Confessions” I have come to regard more as a literary performance than for any benefit to mankind on the subject of opium there is in them, and as a literary performance the work was undoubtedly intended. There is more uniformity of style in it than in any of his other works of that length that I have read. He is more equable, though smooth and fluent. Still there is a break or two of humor in it that may sound harsh, though not the horrible, grisly, blood-curdling humor that he has in some of his pieces in the shape of irony. He oversteps the modesty of nature in his use of the satirical, I think. He seems hard and cruel sometimes, especially in “Coleridge and Opium Eating,” when speaking of Coleridge enticing Gillman into the habit of eating opium, and other places in the same paper. In many instances I think he loses his dignity altogether and becomes very coarse; that is, slangy and common. He ever seems to think that to be smart, to be a success, to be formidable, is to be humorous. He has many brilliant flashes of intellectual humor, but it is all from the brain, and lacks the true ring that comes from the healthy overflowing of nature. He has cold, steel-like wit, that comes from the head.
My recollection of his “Antigone of Sophocles,” is as of a man jumping upon horseback and riding the animal to death, unless the journey’s end be reached previously. There is no resting-place—on the reader goes after the idea till the end, and it is a long and barren road to travel. He (De Quincey) seems nervous—highly so; too much so to allow his reader peace and ease in reading this paper and others, and parts of other long ones, I judge. I fear the reader would fain cry out, “What, in the name of Judas Iscariot, is the man after, and when is he going to catch up to it? I am out of breath.” This “Greek Tragedy” paper, as it is called elsewhere,[6] seemed lean and very wordy to me. Still, with all his faults, De Quincey was a brilliant writer, and generally on the right side of questions—humane, and upholding the down-trodden whenever opportunity offered.
NOTE No. 6.—THIRD NOTE ON COLERIDGE AND PLAGIARISM.
De Quincey, in his article entitled “Samuel Taylor Coleridge,” descants as follows: “Coleridge’s essay in particular is prefaced by a few words, in which, aware of his coincidence with Shelling, he declares his willingness to acknowledge himself indebted to so great a man, in any case where the truth would allow him to do so; but, in this particular case, insisting on the impossibility that he could have borrowed arguments which he had first seen some years after he had thought out the whole hypothesis pro pria marte. After this, what was my astonishment, to find that the entire essay, from the first word to the last, is a verbatim translation from Shelling, with no attempt in a single instance to appropriate the paper, by developing the arguments, or by diversifying the illustrations. Some other obligations to Shelling, of a slighter kind, I have met with in the ‘Biographia Literaria:’ but this was a barefaced plagiarism, which could in prudence have been risked only by relying too much upon the slight knowledge of German literature in this country, and especially of that section of the German literature.” De Quincey goes on to say, in the way of extenuation of his charge of plagiarism against Coleridge, that Coleridge did not do this from poverty of intellect. “Not at all.” He denies that flat. “There lay the wonder,” he says. “He spun daily and at all hours,” proceeds De Quincey, “for mere amusement of his own activities, and from the loom of his own magical brain, theories more gorgeous by far, and supported by a pomp and luxury of images such as Shelling—no, nor any German that ever breathed, not John Paul—could have emulated in his dreams.” There you go again De Quincey—the demon of hyperbole again driving you to extremes; forever denouncing beyond reason or praising beyond desert. No one else ever claimed so much for Coleridge. De Quincey says Shelling was “worthy in some respects to be Coleridge’s assessor.” He accounts for Coleridge’s borrowing on the principle of kleptomania.... “In fact reproduced in a new form, applying itself to intellectual wealth, that maniacal propensity which is sometimes well known to attack enormous proprietors and millionnaires for acts of petty larceny.” And cites a case of a Duke having a mania for silver spoons. This is “all bosh,” and the wrong theory of Coleridge’s borrowing from Shelling; and as to his loans from any one else, they were as few as those of any writer. The true theory is, that he was after truth, and had thought out as well as Shelling the doctrines promulgated by the latter. He could claim as much originality as Shelling in a system, “introduced by Bruno,” and advocated by Kant, and of which he (Shelling) was only “the most successful improver.”
And also, that “he” (Coleridge) “regarded truth as a divine ventriloquist, he cared not from whose mouth the sounds were supposed to proceed if only the words were audible and intelligible.” He borrowed the language of Shelling, but that is all. But De Quincey, after all his flourish of trumpets and initiatory war-whoop, volunteers to say that “Coleridge, he most heartily believes, to have been as entirely original in all his capital pretensions, as any one man that ever has existed as—Archimedes, in ancient days, or as Shakespeare, in modern.”
In estimating the value of Coleridge’s “robberies,” their usefulness to himself, etc., De Quincey draws a parallel between them and the contents of a child’s pocket.