Besides the impersonal wisdom and the personal anecdotes of the Table Talk, however, there are a great number of opinions which show us Coleridge not as a seer, but as a “character”—a crusty gentleman, every whit as ready to express an antipathy as a principle. He shared Dr. Johnson’s quarrel with the Scots, and said of them:
I have generally found a Scotchman with a little literature very disagreeable. He is a superficial German or a dull Frenchman. The Scotch will attribute merit to people of any nation rather than the English.
He had no love for Jews, or Dissenters, or Catholics, and anticipated Carlyle’s hostility to the emancipation of the negroes. He raged against the Reform Bill, Catholic Emancipation, and the education of the poor in schools. He was indignant with Belgium for claiming national independence. One cannot read much of his talk about politics without amazement that so wise a man should have been so frequently a fool. At the same time, he generally remained an original fool. He never degenerated into a mere partisan. He might be deceived by reactionary ideals, but he was not taken in by reactionary leaders. He was no more capable than Shelley of mistaking Castlereagh for a great man, and he did not join in the glorification of Pitt. Like Dr. Johnson, he could be a Tory without feeling that it was necessary at all costs to bully Ireland. Coleridge, indeed, went so far as to wish to cut the last link with Ireland as the only means of saving England. Discussing the Irish question, he said:
I am quite sure that no dangers are to be feared by England from the disannexing and independence of Ireland at all comparable with the evils which have been, and will yet be, caused to England by the Union. We have never received one particle of advantage from our association with Ireland…. Mr. Pitt has received great credit for effecting the Union; but I believe it will sooner or later be discovered that the manner in which, and the terms upon which, he effected it made it the most fatal blow that ever was levelled against the peace and prosperity of England. From it came the Catholic Bill. From the Catholic Bill has come this Reform Bill! And what next?
When one thinks of the injury that the subjection of Ireland has done the English name in America, in Russia, in Australia, and elsewhere in quite recent times, one can hardly deny that on this matter Coleridge was a sound prophet.
It is the literary rather than the political opinions, however, that will bring every generation of readers afresh to Coleridge’s Table Talk. No man ever talked better in a few sentences on Shakespeare, Sterne, and the tribe of authors. One may not agree with Coleridge in regarding Jeremy Taylor as one of the four chief glories of English literature, or in thinking Southey’s style “next door to faultless.” But one listens to his obiter dicta eagerly as the sayings of one of the greatest minds that have interested themselves in the criticism of literature. There are tedious pages in Table Talk, but these are, for the most part, concerned with theology. On the whole, the speech of Coleridge was golden. Even the leaden parts are interesting because they are Coleridge’s lead. One wishes the theology was balanced, however, by a few more glimpses of his lighter interests, such as we find in the passage: “Never take an iambus for a Christian name. A trochee, or tribrach, will do very well. Edith and Rotha are my favourite names for women.” What we want most of all in table talk is to get an author into the confession album. Coleridge’s Table Talk would have stood a worse chance of immortality were it not for the fact that he occasionally came down out of the pulpit and babbled.
[XIII.—Tennyson: A Temporary Criticism]
If Tennyson’s reputation has diminished, it is not that it has fallen before hostile criticism: it has merely faded through time. Perhaps there was never an English poet who loomed so large to his own age as Tennyson—who represented his contemporaries with the same passion and power. Pope was sufficiently representative of his age, but his age meant, by comparison, a limited and aristocratic circle. Byron represented and shocked his age by turns. Tennyson, on the other hand, was as close to the educated middle-class men and women of his time as the family clergyman. That is why, inevitably, he means less to us than he did to them. That he was ahead of his age on many points on which this could not be said of the family clergyman one need not dispute. He was a kind of “new theologian.” He stood, like Dean Farrar, for the larger hope and various other heresies. Every representative man is ahead of his age—a little, but not enough to be beyond the reach of the sympathies of ordinary people. It may be objected that Tennyson is primarily an artist, not a thinker, and that he should be judged not by his message but by his song. But his message and his song sprang from the same vision—a vision of the world seen, not sub specie æternitatis, but sub specie the reign of Queen Victoria. Before we appreciate Tennyson’s real place in literature, we must frankly recognize the fact that his muse wore a crinoline. The great mass of his work bears its date stamped upon it as obviously almost as a copy of The Times. How topical, both in mood and phrasing, are such lines as those in Locksley Hall: