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.