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,