Saturday, Midnight.
To the first of these letters Cottle replied with a five-pound note; but he now believed that all Coleridge’s earnings went to fill what he calls the “Circean chalice” (Rem., 391). He believed that Coleridge was spending £2 10s. a week on opium. It is as likely that Coleridge was now keeping the home of the Morgans going; although they oftener kept him than he kept them. We know that he gave them the money received for the Christabel volume.
From the first letter to Cottle it will be seen that Coleridge had been collecting his poems with a view to publication, afterwards given to the world as Sibylline Leaves. On 3rd April 1815, he writes to Lady Beaumont requesting a copy of the Poem to Wordsworth composed on hearing the Prelude (Coleorton Mem., ii, 175). Wordsworth had just published the Excursion, and on 30th May Coleridge wrote to Wordsworth criticising that poem (Knight’s Life of Wordsworth, ii, 255) in a long letter, which, with other notes (Anima Poetae) of 1802, contained the germs of the Critique of the Biographia Literaria. The Biographia was at first merely intended as an Introduction to the Sibylline Leaves; but in the writing it swelled so much that it had to be published as a separate work (see Dykes Campbell’s Life, pp. 212–14).
Coleridge has been charged with plagiarism from Schelling, in composing his Biographia, by Ferrier in Blackwood’s Magazine of 1840, and by others.[93] Some others complain that Coleridge has no formal scheme of philosophy of his own. But this is merely saying it was never written down in its entirety, not that he did not have a philosophy. One of the features of Coleridge is that he was never without a Philosophy, and could not speak without betraying the fact that he judged all things from a standpoint which was the centre of a large planetary system of dependent and interdependent ideas. Coleridge’s philosophy is a combination of parts of the philosophies of Plato, Plotinus, Giordano Bruno, Vico, Berkeley, Herder, Kant, Maas, and Schelling; he took freely from all his predecessors, as every new philosopher is bound to do, and has done, before him. Nor is he merely eclectic; his borrowings are fused together into a system. His originality consists not in the ideas which he entertains in his system, but in the reconstellation of these ideas. To charge Coleridge with plagiarism for having appropriated certain trains of thinking from others is on a level with the brilliant discovery which finds that Shakespeare pilfered some of his plots and stories from Italian novels, or that Molière took his own where he found it (Je prend mon bien où je le trouve).
The valuable parts of the Biographia, however, are not the philosophical, but the critical and biographical portions. The Critique on Wordsworth’s poetry will always be reckoned as the finest of our literary criticisms on Wordsworth. We may object to Coleridge’s strictures on The Daffodils or Alice Fell, but lovers of Wordsworth will give general acquiescence to the contentions of Coleridge’s discriminating criticism. Coleridge stands in the front rank of those great exponents of Poetry and Art who, from Aristotle to Sainte-Beuve, have guided the taste of the nations.
The contention of the closing paragraph that Faith is but the continuation of Reason is founded on a saying of his early love, Mary Evans, that “Faith is only Reason applied to a particular subject” (Letters, 88). It was written in her farewell letter in 1794.
Among the works of Coleridge undertaken at Calne was the drama of Zapolya, in which the character of Sarolta, an offshoot from the Christabel idea, appears.
These works were composed by Coleridge to tide over the necessities of the time, but the Morgans and he were unable to hold together, and Coleridge came once more to London at the beginning of 1816. Morgan fell into ill health. Mrs. Morgan latterly had to take a situation as teacher of a charity school; Charles Lamb and Southey got up a subscription annuity of £25 for Morgan, who did not live long to enjoy it, dying in 1820 (Southey’s Life and Correspondence, iv, 361); and after 1823 Charlotte Brent disappears from the arena of literary history (Letters, 722).
Coleridge’s letters to Dr. Brabant of Devizes, were written between February 1815, and 5th December 1816, and are published in the Westminster Review for 1870.]