BY GEORGE E. WOODBERRY
amuel Taylor Coleridge, the English poet and philosopher, was born at Ottery St. Mary, in Devonshire, October 21st, 1772. He was the ninth and youngest son of the vicar of the parish,—a man characterized by learning and also by some of its foibles,—under whose care he passed his childhood; but on the death of his father he was sent up to London to be educated at Christ's Hospital, and there spent, in companionship with Lamb, his school days from 1782 to 1791. He went in the latter year to Jesus College Cambridge. His career as an undergraduate was marked by an escapade,—his enlistment in the King's Regiment of Light Dragoons in the winter of 1793-94, from which he was released by the influence of his relatives; and in more important ways by his friendship with Southey, whom he found on a visit to Oxford, and his engagement to Sarah Fricker in the summer of 1794. He had already been attached to another young lady, Mary Evans, with whose family he had been intimate. In December 1794 he left Cambridge without taking a degree, and on October 21st, 1795, he was married. His biography from this point is one of confused and intricate detail, which only a long story could set forth plainly and exactly. Its leading external events were a residence in Germany in 1798-99 and a voyage to Malta, with travel in Sicily and Italy in 1804-6; in its inward development, the turning-points of his life were his first intimacy with the Wordsworths in 1797, during which his best poems were composed; his subjection to the opium habit, with increasing domestic unhappiness, in 1801-2; and his retreat under medical control to Highgate in 1816. He was practically separated from his family from the time of his voyage to Malta. Troubles of many kinds filled all these years, but he had always a power to attract friends who were deeply interested in his welfare, and he was never without admirers and helpers. Before he withdrew to Highgate he had resided first at Stowey in the neighborhood of Tom Poole, and later at Greta Hall near the Wordsworths; but he was often away from home, and after he ceased to be an inmate there, from 1806 to 1816, he led a wandering life, either in lodgings frequently changed, or in visits to his friends. His resources were always small, and from the start his friends were his patrons, making up subscriptions, loans, and gifts for him; in 1798 the Wedgwoods gave him a pension of £150 for life, which was soon secured for the support of his family, and in 1812 one-half of this was withdrawn; in 1825 he was granted a royal pension of one hundred guineas, and when this lapsed in 1830 Frere made it up to him. De Quincey had distinguished himself by an act of singular and impulsive generosity to him, upon first acquaintance. He was always cared for, though his indulgence in opium made it difficult for those who knew the fact to assist him directly in a wise way. His pecuniary embarrassment, however, was constant and trying during a great part of his life; his own wretchedness of spirit, under the painful conditions of his bodily state and his moral as well as material position, was very great; but through all these sufferings and trials he maintained sufficient energy to leave behind him a considerable body of literary work. He died July 25th, 1834.
The poetic genius of Coleridge, the highest of his many gifts, found brilliant and fascinating expression. His poems—those in which his fame lives—are as unique as they are memorable; and though their small number, their confined range, and the brief period during which his faculty was exercised with full freedom and power, seem to indicate a narrow vein, yet the remainder of his work in prose and verse leaves an impression of extraordinary and abundant intellectual force. In proportion as his imaginative creations stand apart, the spirit out of which they came must have possessed some singularity: and if the reader is not content with simple aesthetic appreciation of what the gods provide, but has some touch of curiosity leading him to look into the source of such remarkable achievement and its human history, he is at once interested in the personality of the "subtle-souled psychologist," as Shelley with his accurate critical insight first named him; in experiencing the fascination of the poetry one remembers the charm which Coleridge had in life, that quality which arrested attention in all companies and drew men's minds and hearts with a sense of something marvelous in him—"the most wonderful man," said Wordsworth, "that I ever met." The mind and heart of Coleridge, his whole life, have been laid open by himself and his friends and acquaintances without reserve in many volumes of letters and memoirs; it is easy to figure him as he lived and to recover his moods and aspect: but in order to conceive his nature and define its traits, it is necessary to take account especially of his incomplete and less perfect work, of his miscellaneous interests, and those activities which filled and confused his life without having any important share in establishing his fame.
The intellectual precocity which is the leading trait of Coleridge's boyhood, in the familiar portrait of "the inspired charity-boy" drawn by Lamb from schoolboy memories, is not unusual in a youth of genius; but the omnivorousness of knowledge which he then displayed continued into his manhood. He consumed vast quantities of book-learning. It is a more remarkable characteristic that from the earliest period in which he comes into clear view, he was accustomed to give out his ideas with freedom in an inexhaustible stream of talk. The activity of his mind was as phenomenal as its receptivity. In his college days, too, he was fanatical in all his energies. The remark of Southey after Shelley's visit to him, that here was a young man who was just what he himself had been in his college days, is illustrative; for if Southey was then inflamed with radicalism, Coleridge was yet more deeply infected and mastered by that wild fever of the revolutionary dawn. The tumult of Coleridge's mind, its incessant action, the lack of discipline in his thought, of restraint in his expression, of judgment in his affairs, are all important elements in his character at a time which in most men would be called the formative period of manhood, but which in him seems to have been intensely chaotic; what is most noticeable, however, is the volume of his mental energy. He expressed himself, too, in ways natural to such self-abundance. He was always a discourser, if the name may be used, from the London days at the "Salutation and the Cat" of which Lamb tells, saying that the landlord was ready to retain him because of the attraction of his conversation for customers; and as he went on to the more set forms of such monologue, he became a preacher without pay in Unitarian chapels, a journalist with unusual capacity for ready and sonorous writing in the press, a composer of whole periodicals such as his ventures The Watchman and The Friend, and a lecturer using only slight notes as the material of his remarks upon literature, education, philosophy, theology, or whatever the subject might be. In all these methods of expression which he took up one after the other, he merely talked in an ample way upon multifarious topics; in the conversation, sermon, leading article, written discourse, or flowing address, he was master of a swelling and often brilliant volubility, but he had neither the certainty of the orator nor the unfailing distinction of the author; there was an occasional and impromptu quality, a colloquial and episodical manner, the style of the irresponsible speaker. In his earlier days especially, the dominant note in Coleridge's whole nature was excitement. He was always animated, he was often violent, he was always without the principle of control. Indeed, a weakness of moral power seems to have been congenital, in the sense that he was not permanently bound by a practical sense of duty nor apparently observant of what place duty has in real life. There was misdirection of his affairs from the time when they came into his own hands; there was impulsiveness, thoughtlessness, a lack of judgment which augured ill for him; and in its total effect this amounted to folly. His intoxication with the scheme known as Pantisocracy, by which he with Southey and a few like-minded projectors were to found a socialistic community on the banks of the Susquehanna, is the most obvious comment on his practical sense. But his marriage, with the anecdotes of its preliminaries (one of which was that in those colloquies with Lamb at the London tavern, so charmingly described by his boon companion, he had forgotten his engagement or was indifferent to it), more strikingly exemplifies the irresponsible course of his life, more particularly as it proved to be ill-sorted, full of petty difficulties and makeshift expedients, and in the end a disastrous failure. A radical social scheme and an imprudent marriage might have fallen to his share of human folly, however, without exciting remark, if in other ways or at a later time he had exhibited the qualities which would allow one to dismiss these matters as mere instances of immaturity; but wherever Coleridge's reasonable control over himself or his affairs is looked to, it appears to have been feeble. On the other hand, the constancy of his excitement is plain. It was not only mental, but physical. He was, as a young man, full of energy and capable of a good deal of hard exercise; he had animal spirits, and Wordsworth describes him as "noisy" and "gamesome," as one who
"His limbs would toss about him with delight,
Like branches when strong winds the trees annoy;"
and from several passages of his own writing, which are usually disregarded, the evidence of a spirit of rough humor and fun is easily obtained. The truth is that Coleridge changed a great deal in his life; he felt himself to be very different in later years from what he was in the time when to his memory even he was a sort of glorified spirit: and this earlier Coleridge had many traits which are ignored sometimes, as Carlyle ignored them, and are sometimes remembered rather as idealizations of his friends in their affectionate thoughts of him, but in any event are irreconcilable with the figure of the last period of his life.
It has been suggested that there was something of disease or at least of ill health in Coleridge always, and that it should be regarded as influencing his temperament. Whether it were so or not, the plea itself shows the fact. If excitement was the dominant note, as has been said, in his whole nature, it could not exist without a physical basis and accompaniment; and his bodily state appears to have been often less one of animation than of agitation, and his correspondence frequently discloses moods that seem almost frantic. In the issue, under stress of pain and trouble, he became an opium-eater; but his physical nature may fairly be described as predisposed to such states as lead to the use of opium and also result from its use, with the attendant mental moods. His susceptibility to sensuous impressions, to a voluptuousness of the entire being, together with a certain lassitude and languor, lead to the same conclusion, which thus seems to be supported on all sides,—that Coleridge was, in his youth and early manhood, fevered through all his intellectual and sensuous nature, and deficient on the moral and practical sides in those matters that related to his personal affairs. It is desirable to bring this out in plain terms, because in Coleridge it is best to acknowledge at once that his character was, so far as our part—the world's part—in him is concerned, of less consequence than his temperament; a subtler and more profound thing than character, though without moral meaning. It is not unfair to say, since literature is to be regarded most profitably as the expression of human personality, that with Coleridge the modern literature of temperament, as it has been lately recognized in extreme phases, begins; not that temperament is a new thing in the century now closing, nor that it has been without influence hitherto, but that now it is more often considered, and has in fact more often been, an exclusive ground of artistic expression. The temperament of Coleridge was one of diffused sensuousness physically, and of abnormal mental moods,—moods of weakness, languor, collapse, of visionary imaginative life with a night atmosphere of the spectral, moonlit, swimming, scarcely substantial world; and the poems he wrote, which are the contributions he made to the world's literature, are based on this temperament, like some Fata Morgana upon the sea. The apparent exclusion of reality from the poems in which his genius was most manifest finds its analogue in the detachment of his own mind from the moral, the practical, the usual in life as he led it in his spirit; and his work of the highest creative sort, which is all there is to his enduring fame, stands amid his prose and verse composition of a lower sort like an island in the waste of waters. This may be best shown, perhaps, by a gradual approach through his cruder to his more perfect compositions.