Hazlitt is suspect, on insufficient evidence, of having reviewed "Christabel" harshly in the Edinburgh Review and the Examiner; but the Quarterly Review found that its success in dealing with "witchery by daylight" is complete. It is a matter for regret that the interest taken in the "Ancient Mariner" and in fragments like "Kubla Khan" and "Christabel" has been at the expense of poems like the "Ode to Dejection" and smaller pieces, gems of poetic thought, finely expressed. As time wore on, the realities of life divorced the poet's muse, now quite a minor quantity, from its union with classicism, to the great advantage of his work, and though he cannot be said to have fulfilled the promise of his best years, he wrote much that his admirers will not willingly let die. One would perhaps hesitate to call it poetry—the work he wrote between his twenty-third and twenty-seventh years was poetry in the fullest sense of the term—it is rather philosophy expressed in set forms with a measure of charm that can never be absent long from any utterance of Coleridge.
It may perhaps be suggested that the poetic genius in Coleridge needed nursing, and failed to get what it required; to a certain extent such a theory is permissible. We have to remember, in the first place, that his health was bad from youth. He was very susceptible to rheumatism; before middle age he was a martyr to gout; he could not endure extreme cold; and yet he elected to go and live at Greta Hall, in the Vale of Derwentwater, where the rain it raineth nearly every day, and strong harsh winds are the rule rather than the exception. These surroundings confirmed and strengthened the opium habit. To make matters worse, his home life was not of the kind that makes for poetry. Mrs. Coleridge was in many respects a deserving and worthy lady, but she had grave limitations. With things of the intellect she was not on any terms, however remote, and she had a weakness that is said to extend to others of her sex—she worried incessantly about trifles. Reading closely the history of the unhappy married life that involved husband and wife in so much trouble, the mistake of marrying the wrong woman may be condoned. To the overstrung "philosopher in a mist," as he describes himself in one of his earliest letters from Greta Hall, a querulous wife who found small grievances everywhere, who judged her husband's talent from the standpoint of what it brought in from the publishers, must have been a sore trial. In the same way, for the sake of justice, let us admit that the man who was always ready to undertake work that he could never be prevailed upon to begin, who was erratic, intemperate, and wholly unreliable, must have been a sore trouble to any woman who could not appreciate his gifts, and could discern nothing in the future save an increasing family and a diminishing income. But whatever the proper apportionment of praise or blame, one fact remains. At Greta Hall the fine flame of poetic inspiration burned low, and never afterwards recovered its pristine radiance. Professor Alois Brandl does not go too far when he says that at the age of thirty, that is by the year 1802, Coleridge was a broken man; and it was this failure of his health, this prolonged suffering from rheumatism and gout, which he sought so foolishly and so vainly to cure by the aid of opium, that turned him from poetry to the study of philosophy in order to find relief. He sought, as he says in that fine but mournful "Ode to Dejection,"
"By abstruse research to steal
From my own nature all the natural man."
And at this point of his life, we find him turning away from the muse, to which nearly all his lasting contribution has long been made, and venturing into a field wherein he was destined to achieve considerable success. Criticism and metaphysics occupied him in turn. The period of study was a very long one; he was forty-four years of age when his Lay Sermons was published, in the wake of much journalism and some desultory and miscellaneous work. Needless to say, he had many brilliant intentions that were never carried out. One of them, a book to supersede all dogmatic philosophy, was designed to fill six hundred pages with "A collection of all possible modes of true, probable, and false reasonings, with a strict analysis of their origin and operation."
But if he did not write the books—and he once declared that the mere titles of those he had projected would fill a volume—Coleridge accomplished a very considerable amount of work. Much of it must be lost. He was an omnivorous reader, and his clear mind could detect flaws in any reasoning that was not sound. He studied Berkeley, Fichte, Hartley, Hegel, Herder, Hume, Kant, Lessing, Maass, Schelling, and Spinoza, studied them with complete understanding, and luminous criticism, and could discourse upon them brilliantly. It needed a well-equipped intelligence to follow him; few could, and the majority thought he talked brilliantly but irrelevantly. We know that this was not the case, the truth being that he was too big for the most of his audience.
He passed through a very considerable number of religious phases. His earlier Pantheism gave way to Rationalism and Unitarianism, and he arrived by way of the German transcendental philosophers to his ultimate reconciliation with the doctrines of Christianity. In the years in which he lived this ultimate orthodoxy was good alike for his reputation and his circulation. His influence affected profoundly great thinkers like F. D. Maurice and John Sterling, and it may be doubted whether cheap reprints of certain of his prose writings would not find a considerable measure of success to-day, for it is impossible to deny his gift of style, his capacity to reason closely and clearly, or the intense earnestness and conviction that vitalise his message. It is unfortunate, perhaps, that his most popular work as a poet has kept him from receiving due recognition first as a critic and then as a philosopher, and that his work as a philosopher has been clouded by his unfortunate inability to rule his own life on philosophic lines.
In the order of publication, his prose works are the Lay Sermons, to which reference has been made; the Sibylline Leaves (a revised edition of his poems); the Biographia Literaria (full of valuable criticism badly arranged); the Aids to Reflection (1824); Church and State (1830); and two posthumous works, the Confessions of an Enquiring Mind (1840), and Literary Remains. The Satyrane's Letters was republished in the Biographia Literaria.
It is due probably to his troubled health, that he frequently incorporated the reflections of other men among his own, and accusations of plagiarism were not lacking. Among those who attacked him on this ground were Thomas de Quincey, who led the assault in Tait's Magazine, three months after his sometime friend was dead; Professor Ferrier, some years later; and Sir William Hamilton, this last a singularly bitter critic of little judgment. The charge against Coleridge is one that should not have been made, even though it may be sustained to the complete satisfaction of those who like to belittle great minds.
"I regard truth as a Divine ventriloquist, and care not from whose mouth the sounds are supposed to proceed, if only the words be audible and intelligible." In this passage Coleridge summed up an attitude that will satisfy all who can take a sane and dispassionate view of his life, and weigh its accomplishments and vicissitudes. Certain thoughts are the children of every era, and will reach more than one thinker at a time; they belong to the man who can make noblest use of them.