Hours in a Library, Volume 3 / New Edition, with Additions

by Leslie Stephen

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.