CHAPTER XXVIII
THE NEW ACADEME
[The letters to Allsop gradually lessen in number as we draw away from the year 1822. This is not necessarily because there was less communication between the two friends, but more probably because their meetings were more frequent. The Gillmans, on account of the large circle of friends who assembled round their guest, had to set aside an afternoon once a week as a special “at home” day for the convenience of visitors (Life of Alaric Watts, i, 244–45). This was the origin of the Table Talk, edited by Henry Nelson Coleridge, which begins on 29th December 1822, and continues, with breaks, to the year 1834. Various accounts have been given of these celebrated Thursdays, the most notable of which is that of J. Noon Talfourd in the concluding chapter of his Final Memorials of Charles Lamb. The scraps of Table Talk, published by Henry Nelson Coleridge, though reckoned of great value, are, after all, very isolated; and to any one who has studied Coleridge’s prose works and can comprehend the “grand planetary wheelings” of his logic they appear insufficient to warrant the accounts of the eulogists of Coleridge’s conversational ability. Doubtless they have the same relationship to Coleridge’s conversation as the shattered fragments of the great icebergs which come floating down the Gulf Stream and wreck themselves on the coasts of Iceland have to the icebergs of which they are the disunited parts.
Many men who afterwards attained to eminence in their several departments gathered at the Grove to hear Coleridge discourse. Charles and Mary Lamb, Basil Montagu and his wife, J. Hookham Frere, Henry Crabb Robinson, John Sterling, Henry Nelson Coleridge, Allsop, and Joseph Henry Green, may be regarded as the planets who revolved around the central sun. The planets, too, occasionally brought their satellites. Joseph Henry Green made Coleridge’s acquaintance in 1817. Deeply interested in philosophy, he imbibed Coleridge’s principles, and afterwards wrote a book on the Logos, published in 1865 as Spiritual Philosophy. Edward Irving also sat at the feet of Coleridge; he brought Carlyle to Highgate in 1824, who wrote his impressions of Coleridge to his brother the same year, and twenty years later depicted Coleridge in colours which will remain beside those of Hazlitt, De Quincey, Noon Talfourd, Henry Nelson Coleridge, and Clement Carlyon and T. Colley Grattan, one of the fine gallery of contemporary literary portraits of Coleridge. Dr. Chalmers came in 1827 and caught occasional glimpses of meaning, (Memoir by Hanna, ii, 126–27): and Emerson called in 1833, without, however, any vital feeling of spiritual inter-relationship springing up between them, (English Traits).
During 1824 Coleridge was much engaged with Religious subjects; and then composed those Letters afterwards published as Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit.
Our next letter refers to the Aids to Reflection which Coleridge was now having published. The germs of the volume may be found in the long Theological Letter to Cottle of 1807, in which Coleridge extols Leighton as the best of the old divines, and in a letter to John Murray of 18th January 1822 (Letters, 717) in which he projected a selection of Beauties from Leighton. Its theory of Atonement also lies in germ in the play of Osorio, 1797, (Remorse of 1813). The Aids to Reflection not only became the most popular of Coleridge’s works; it helped to forward interest in his other writings.]
The Aids to Reflection first appeared in 1825. The original title was Aids to Reflection in the formation of a manly character on the several grounds of Prudence, Morality, and Religion; illustrated by select passages from our elder divines, especially from Archbishop Leighton. In an advertisement to the first edition, the Author mentions that the work was proposed and begun as a mere selection from the writings of Leighton, with a few notes and a biographical preface by the selector, but underwent a revolution of plan and object. “It would, indeed,” he adds, “be more correct to say, that the present volume owed its accidental origin to the intention of compiling one of a different description than to speak of it as the same work.” “Still, however, the selections from Leighton, which will be found in the fundamental and moral sections of this work, and which I could retain consistently with its present form and matter, will, both from the intrinsic excellence and from the characteristic beauty of the passages, suffice to answer two prominent purposes of the original plan; that of placing in a clear light the principle which pervades all Leighton’s writings—his sublime view, I mean, of Religion and Morality as the means of reforming the human soul in the Divine Image (Idea); and that of exciting an interest in the works, and an affectionate reverence for the name and memory of this severely tried and truly primitive Churchman.”
Neither Hume nor Clarendon, I believe, mentions the persecution of Archbishop Leighton’s father by the Prelatical party of his day; and yet it was one of their worst acts, and that which most excited wrath and indignation against the Primate—so faithful is their portrait of those times! Never can I read Mr. Wordsworth’s sublime sonnet to Laud, especially the lines,
Prejudged by foes determined not to spare,
An old weak man for vengeance laid aside,