The Art of Letters

by Robert Lynd

That is the most excellent state of society in which the patriotism of the citizen ennobles, but does not merge, the individual energy of the man.

And he can give common sense as well as wisdom imaginative form, as in the sentence:

Truth is a good dog; but beware of barking too close to the heels of error, lest you get your brains knocked out.

“I am, by the law of my nature, a reasoner,” said Coleridge, and he explained that he did not mean by this “an arguer.” He was a discoverer of order, of laws, of causes, not a controversialist. He sought after principles, whether in politics or literature. He quarrelled with Gibbon because his Decline and Fall was “little else but a disguised collection of … splendid anecdotes” instead of a philosophic search for the ultimate causes of the ruin of the Roman Empire. Coleridge himself formulated these causes in sentences that are worth remembering at a time when we are debating whether the world of the future is to be a vast boxing ring of empires or a community of independent nations. He said:

The true key to the declension of the Roman Empire—which is not to be found in all Gibbon’s immense work—may be stated in two words: the imperial character overlaying, and finally destroying, the national character. Rome under Trajan was an empire without a nation.

One must not claim too much for Coleridge, however. He was a seer with his head among the stars, but he was also a human being with uneven gait, stumbling amid infirmities, prejudices, and unhappinesses. He himself boasted in a delightful sentence:

For one mercy I owe thanks beyond all utterance—that, with all my gastric and bowel distempers, my head hath ever been like the head of a mountain in blue air and sunshine.

It is to be feared that Coleridge’s “gastric and bowel distempers” had more effect on his head than he was aware of. Like other men, he often spoke out of a heart full of grievances. He uttered the bitterness of an unhappily married dyspeptic when he said: “The most happy marriage I can picture or image to myself would be the union of a deaf man to a blind woman.” It is amusing to reflect that one of the many books which he wished to write was “a book on the duties of women, more especially to their husbands.” One feels, again, that in his defence of the egoism of the great reformers, he was apologizing for a vice of his own rather than making an impersonal statement of truth. “How can a tall man help thinking of his size,” he asked, “when dwarfs are constantly standing on tiptoe beside him?” The personal note that occasionally breaks in upon the oracular rhythm of the Table Talk, however, is a virtue in literature, even if a lapse in philosophy. The crumbs of a great man’s autobiography are no less precious than the crumbs of his wisdom. There are moods in which one prefers his egotism to his great thoughts. It is pleasant to hear Coleridge boasting; “The Ancient Mariner cannot be imitated, nor the poem Love. They may be excelled; they are not imitable.” One is amused to know that he succeeded in offending Lamb on one occasion by illustrating “the cases of vast genius in proportion to talent and the predominance of talent in conjunction with genius in the persons of Lamb and himself.” It is amusing, too, to find that, while Wordsworth regarded The Ancient Mariner as a dangerous drag on the popularity of Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge looked on his poem as the feature that had sold the greatest number of the copies of the book. It is only fair to add that in taking this view he spoke not self-complacently, but humorously:

I was told by Longmans that the greater part of the Lyrical Ballads had been sold to seafaring men, who, having heard of the Ancient Mariner, concluded that it was a naval song-book, or, at all events, that it had some relation to nautical matters.

Of autobiographical confessions there are not so many in Table Talk as one would like. At the same time, there are one or two which throw light on the nature of Coleridge’s imagination. We get an idea of one of the chief differences between the poetry of Coleridge and the poetry of Wordsworth when we read the confession: