It is impossible to deny that for all his shortcomings Coleridge did more for his countrymen than his countrymen did for him, and harsh criticism is unbecoming the present generation, which enjoys the full benefit of his work, and has not suffered any of the disappointments that he inflicted upon his contemporaries. Let us remember, too, that he was a simple and modest man, and nowhere claims to be a distinguished poet or a great philosopher. He knew that he had more than the average mental gift, but instead of pride in his possession we find him regretting deeply his inability to justify it. Indeed, he goes further than this, for he says in one of his letters that Wordsworth taught him to recognise some of his limitations. The letter is written to Godwin when Coleridge was in his thirty-first year, and in it he says that Wordsworth, by showing him what true poetry was, made him know that he himself was no poet.
Coleridge had a very highly developed critical faculty, and exercised it brilliantly in his writings on Shakespeare. His criticisms sparkle with intelligence; terse and virile, they leave the reader regretting that they were not extended. He speaks of Polonius, "a statesman somewhat past his faculties"; of Lear as "the ample and open playground of Nature's passions."
Whether as poet, critic, or metaphysician, Coleridge was a progressive thinker, and broke away slowly but deliberately from the fetters of form that cripple his earliest utterances; nor were the flights of his thought less remarkable than his experiments in method.
Whatever his acts, his intentions were of the highest. He sought to do good, and he placed at the service of his countrymen the best that he had to offer. One can only speculate upon the extent of the loss that his chronic ill-health inflicted upon his own and succeeding generations. His were the instincts of the schoolmaster, but of the schoolmaster who takes all his fellow-countrymen for pupils. His discourses on poetry, founded so largely upon prolonged and intimate study of Wordsworth, stand to-day one of the finest examinations of the range and proper limitation of poetic expression.
Coleridge was destined to be overshadowed in his own time, and in the critical years immediately following his death, by more powerful personalities—men whose appeal to the public was more immediate and better sustained; but much that he wrote a hundred years ago is of importance to us to-day, and modern criticism, detached, impersonal, and with a true perspective, can hardly fail to do him justice in any of the departments of his life-work.
How did he appeal to his contemporaries? Criticism was generally undiscerning and hostile, but those who came within the charmed circle were, with rare exception, delighted. The secret of his appeal passed with him; there are still some who wonder how it has come about that, the limits of ordered achievement being so marked, Coleridge stands where he does. Poet, critic, and metaphysician, in each capacity he had attracted the interest and retained the regard of a great majority of his most notable contemporaries. His inspiration came by fits and starts, but, when it did come, would find expression in felicitous phrases revealing some aspects of truth that captured the imagination. At the end of a long unhappy and often ill-spent life, he could command the unstinted admiration of such a sour-tongued old critic as Thomas Carlyle. Hear him in his Life of Sterling:
"Coleridge sat on the brow of Highgate Hill in those years looking down on London and its smoke tumult like a sage escaped from the inanity of life's battle, attracting towards him the thoughts of innumerable brave souls still engaged there.... A sublime man, who alone in those dark days had saved his crown of spiritual manhood, escaping from the black materialism and revolutionary deluges with 'God, Freedom, Immortality' still his; a king of men."
And later he describes him with the true Carlyle touch as that "heavy laden, high aspiring, and surely much suffering man." Wordsworth said that Coleridge was the only wonderful man he had ever met; Nelson Coleridge said that a day spent with Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a "sabbath past expression, deep, tranquil, and serene."
Find him at the right time and in happy mood, he was capable of great feats. For example, he was invited one morning to lecture before the London Philosophical Society. He went with Gillman to the secretary to inquire the subject chosen, but the secretary was out. In the evening Coleridge and Gillman went to the Society's rooms, and heard the announcement made that Mr. Coleridge would deliver an address on "The Growth of the Individual Mind." He spoke extempore for over an hour and a half, holding a critical audience enthralled.
Joseph Henry Green, whose two posthumous volumes entitled Spiritual Philosophy, founded upon the teaching of the late Samuel Taylor Coleridge, were published in 1865, was sufficiently under the spell to devote a whole life-work to his master's teaching.