Mr. Coleridge seems to us, from this early association, to overrate the merits of Bowles’s Sonnets, which he prefers to Warton’s, which last we, in our turn, prefer to Wordsworth’s, and indeed to any Sonnets in the language. He cannot, however, be said to overrate the extent of the intellectual obligations which he thinks he owes to his favourite writer. If the study of Mr. Bowles’s poems could have effected a permanent cure of that ‘preposterous’ state of mind which he has above described, his gratitude, we admit, should be boundless: But the disease, we fear, was in the mind itself; and the study of poetry, instead of counteracting, only gave force to the original propensity; and Mr. Coleridge has ever since, from the combined forces of poetic levity and metaphysic bathos, been trying to fly, not in the air, but under ground—playing at hawk and buzzard between sense and nonsense,—floating or sinking in fine Kantean categories, in a state of suspended animation ’twixt dreaming and awake,—quitting the plain ground of ‘history and particular facts’ for the first butterfly theory, fancy-bred from the maggots of his brain,—going up in an air-balloon filled with fetid gas from the writings of Jacob Behmen and the mystics, and coming down in a parachute made of the soiled and fashionable leaves of the Morning Post,—promising us an account of the Intellectual System of the Universe, and putting us off with a reference to a promised dissertation on the Logos, introductory to an intended commentary on the entire Gospel of St. John. In the above extract, he tells us, with a degree of naïveté not usual with him, that, ‘even before his fifteenth year, history and particular facts had lost all interest in his mind.’ Yet, so little is he himself aware of the influence which this feeling still continues to exert over his mind, and of the way in which it has mixed itself up in his philosophical faith, that he afterwards makes it the test and definition of a sound understanding and true genius, that ‘the mind is affected by thoughts, rather than by things; and only then feels the requisite interest even for the most important events and accidents, when by means of meditation they have passed into thoughts.’ p. 30. We do not see, after this, what right Mr. C. has to complain of those who say that he is neither the most literal nor logical of mortals; and the worst that has ever been said of him is, that he is the least so. If it is the proper business of the philosopher to dream over theories, and to neglect or gloss over facts, to fit them to his theories or his conscience; we confess we know of few writers, ancient or modern, who have come nearer to the perfection of this character than the author before us.
After a desultory and unsatisfactory attempt (Chap. II.) to account for and disprove the common notion of the irritability of authors, Mr. Coleridge proceeds (by what connexion we know not) to a full, true and particular account of the personal, domestic, and literary habits of his friend Mr. Southey,—to all which we have but one objection, namely, that it seems quite unnecessary, as we never heard them impugned,—except indeed by the Antijacobin writers, here quoted by Mr. Coleridge, who is no less impartial as a friend, than candid as an enemy. The passage altogether is not a little remarkable.
‘It is not, however,’ says our author, ‘from grateful recollections only, that I have been impelled thus to leave these my deliberate sentiments on record; but in some sense as a debt of justice to the man, whose name has been so often connected with mine, for evil to which he is a stranger. As a specimen, I subjoin part of a note from the ‘Beauties of the Anti-Jacobin,’ in which, having previously informed the Public that I had been dishonoured at Cambridge for preaching Deism, at a time when, for my youthful ardour in defence of Christianity, I was decried as a bigot by the proselytes of French philosophy, the writer concludes with these words—‘Since this time he has left his native country, commenced citizen of the world, left his poor children fatherless, and his wife destitute. Ex his disce his friends, Lamb and Southey.’ ‘With severest truth,’ continues Mr. Coleridge, ‘it may be asserted, that it would not be easy to select two men more exemplary in their domestic affections, than those whose names were thus printed at full length, as in the same rank of morals with a denounced infidel and fugitive, who had left his children fatherless, and his wife destitute! Is it surprising that many good men remained longer than perhaps they otherwise would have done, adverse to a party which encouraged and openly rewarded the authors of such atrocious calumnies?’ p. 71.
With us, we confess the wonder does not lie there:—all that surprises us is, that the objects of these atrocious calumnies were ever reconciled to the authors of them;—for the calumniators were the party itself. The Cannings, the Giffords, and the Freres, have never made any apology for the abuse which they then heaped upon every nominal friend of freedom; and yet Mr. Coleridge thinks it necessary to apologize in the name of all good men, for having remained so long adverse to a party which recruited upon such a bounty; and seems not obscurely to intimate that they had such effectual means of propagating their slanders against those good men who differed with them, that most of the latter found there was no other way of keeping their good name but by giving up their principles, and joining in the same venal cry against all those who did not become apostates or converts, ministerial Editors, and ‘laurel-honouring Laureates’ like themselves!—What! at the very moment when this writer is complaining of a foul and systematic conspiracy against the characters of himself, and his most intimate friends, he suddenly stops short in his half-finished burst of involuntary indignation, and ends with a lamentable affectation of surprise at the otherwise unaccountable slowness of good men in yielding implicit confidence to a party, who had such powerful arts of conversion in their hands,—who could with impunity, and triumphantly, take away by atrocious calumnies the characters of all who disdained to be their tools, and rewarded with honours, places, and pensions all those who were. This is pitiful enough, we confess; but it is too painful to be dwelt on.
Passing from the Laureate’s old Antijacobin, to his present Antiministerial persecutors—‘Publicly,’ exclaims Mr. Coleridge, ‘has Mr. Southey been reviled by men, who (I would fain hope, for the honour of human nature) hurled fire-brands against a figure of their own imagination,—publicly have his talents been depreciated, his principles denounced.’ This is very fine and lofty, no doubt; but we wish Mr. C. would speak a little plainer. Mr. Southey has come voluntarily before the public; and all the world has a right to speak of his publications. It is those only that have been either depreciated or denounced. We are not aware, at least, of any attacks that have been made, publicly or privately, on his private life or morality. The charge is, that he wrote democratical nonsense in his youth; and that he has not only taken to write against democracy in his maturer age, but has abused and reviled those who adhere to his former opinions; and accepted of emoluments from the party which formerly calumniated him, for those good services. Now, what has Mr. Coleridge to oppose to this? Mr. Southey’s private character! He evades the only charge brought against him, by repelling one not brought against him, except by his Antijacobin patrons—and answers for his friend, as if he was playing at cross-purposes. Some people say, that Mr. Southey has deserted the cause of liberty: Mr. Coleridge tells us, that he has not separated from his wife. They say, that he has changed his opinions: Mr. Coleridge says, that he keeps his appointments; and has even invented a new word, reliability, to express his exemplariness in this particular. It is also objected, that the worthy Laureate was as extravagant in his early writings, as he is virulent in his present ones: Mr. Coleridge answers, that he is an early riser, and not a late sitter up. It is further alleged, that he is arrogant and shallow in political discussion, and clamours for vengeance in a cowardly and intemperate tone: Mr. Coleridge assures us, that he eats, drinks, and sleeps moderately. It is said that he must either have been very hasty in taking up his first opinions, or very unjustifiable in abandoning them for their contraries; and Mr. Coleridge observes, that Mr. Southey exhibits, in his own person and family, all the regularity and praiseworthy punctuality of an eight-day clock. With all this we have nothing to do. Not only have we said nothing against this gentleman’s private virtues, but we have regularly borne testimony to his talents and attainments as an author, while we have been compelled to take notice of his defects. Till this panegyric of Mr. Coleridge, indeed, we do not know where there was so much praise of him to be found as in our pages. Does Mr. Coleridge wish to get a monopoly for criticising the works of his friends? If we had a particular grudge against any of them, we might perhaps apply to him for his assistance.
Of Mr. Southey’s prose writings we have had little opportunity to speak; but we should speak moderately. He has a clear and easy style, and brings a large share of information to most subjects he handles. But, on practical and political matters, we cannot think him a writer of any weight. He has too little sympathy with the common pursuits, the follies, the vices, and even the virtues of the rest of mankind, to have any tact or depth of insight into the actual characters or manners of men. He is in this respect a mere bookworm, shut up in his study, and too attentive to his literary duty to mind what is passing about him. He has no humour. His wit is at once scholastic and vulgar. As to general principles of any sort, we see no traces of any thing like them in any of his writings. He shows the same contempt for abstract reasoning that Mr. Coleridge has for ‘history and particular facts.’ Even his intimacy with the metaphysical author of the ‘Friend,’ with whom he has chimed in, both in poetry and politics, in verse and prose, in Jacobinism and Antijacobinism, any time these twenty years, has never inoculated him with the most distant admiration of Hartley, or Berkeley, or Jacob Behmen, or Spinosa, or Kant, or Fichte, or Schelling. His essays are in fact the contents of his common-place-book, strung together with little thought or judgment, and rendered marketable by their petulant adaptation to party-purposes—‘full of wise saws and modern instances’—with assertions for proofs—conclusions that savour more of a hasty temper than patient thinking—supported by learned authorities that oppress the slenderness of his materials, and quarrel with one another. But our business is not with him; and we leave him to his studies.
With chap. IV. begins the formidable ascent of that mountainous and barren ridge of clouds piled on precipices and precipices on clouds, from the top of which the author deludes us with a view of the Promised Land that divides the regions of Fancy from those of the Imagination, and extends through 200 pages with various inequalities and declensions to the end of the volume. The object of this long-winding metaphysical march, which resembles a patriarchal journey, is to point out and settle the true grounds of Mr. Wordsworth’s claim to originality as a poet; which, if we rightly understand the deduction, turns out to be, that there is nothing peculiar about him; and that his poetry, in so far as it is good for anything at all, is just like any other good poetry. The learned author, indeed, judiciously observes, that Mr. Wordsworth would never have been ‘idly and absurdly’ considered as ‘the founder of a school in poetry,’ if he had not, by some strange mistake, announced the fact himself in his preface to the Lyrical Ballads. This, it must be owned, looks as if Mr. Wordsworth thought more of his peculiar pretensions than Mr. Coleridge appears to do, and really furnishes some excuse for those who took the poet at his word; for which idle and hasty conclusion, moreover, his friend acknowledges that there was some little foundation in diverse silly and puerile passages of that collection, equally unworthy of the poet’s great genius and classical taste.
We shall leave it to Mr. Wordsworth, however, to settle the relative worthlessness of these poems with his critical patron, and also to ascertain whether his commentator has discovered, either his real or his probable meaning in writing that Preface,—and should now proceed with Mr. Coleridge up those intricate and inaccessible steeps to which he invites our steps. ‘It has been hinted,’ says he, with characteristic simplicity, ‘that metaphysics and psychology have long been my hobby-horse. But to have a hobby-horse, and to be vain of it, are so commonly found together, that they pass almost for the same.’ We own the soft impeachment, as Mrs. Malaprop says, and can with difficulty resist the temptation of accepting this invitation—especially as it is accompanied with a sort of challenge. ‘Those at least,’ he adds, ‘who have taken so much pains to render me ridiculous for a perversion of taste, and have supported the charge by attributing strange notions to me, on no other authority than their own conjectures, owe it to themselves as well as to me, not to refuse their attention to my own statement of the theory which I do acknowledge, or shrink from the trouble of examining the grounds on which I rest it, or the arguments which I offer in its justification.’ But, in spite of all this, we must not give way to temptation—and cannot help feeling, that the whole of this discussion is so utterly unreadable in Mr. Coleridge, that it would be most presumptuous to hope that it would become otherwise in our hands. We shall dismiss the whole of this metaphysical investigation, therefore, into the law of association and the nature of fancy, by shortly observing, that we can by no means agree with Mr. C. in refusing to Hobbes the merit of originality in promulgating that law, with its consequences—that we agree with him, generally, in his refutation of Hartley—and that we totally dissent from his encomium on Kant and his followers.
With regard to the claims of the philosopher of Malmesbury as the first discoverer of the principle of association, as it is now understood among metaphysicians, Mr. C. thinks fit to deny it in toto, because Descartes’s work, ‘De Methodo,’ in which there is an intimation of the same doctrine, preceded Hobbes’s ‘De Natura Humana’ by a whole year.—What an interval to invent and mature a whole system in!—But we conceive that Hobbes has a strict claim to the merit of originality in this respect, because he is the first writer who laid down this principle as the sole and universal law of connexion among our ideas:—which principle Hartley afterwards illustrated and applied to an infinite number of particular cases, but did not assert the general theorem itself more broadly or explicitly. We deny that the statement of this principle, as the connecting band of our ideas, is to be found in any of those writers before Hobbes, whom Mr. Coleridge enumerates; Descartes or Melancthon, or those more ‘illustrious obscure,’ Ammerbach, or Ludovicus Vives, or even Aristotle. It is not the having remarked, that association was one source of connexion among certain ideas, that would anticipate this discovery or the theory of Hartley; but the asserting, that this principle was alone sufficient to account for every operation of the human mind, and that there was no other source of connexion among our ideas,—a proposition which Hobbes was undoubtedly the first to assert, and by the assertion of which he did certainly anticipate the system of Hartley; for all that the latter could do, or has attempted to do, after this, was to prove the proposition in detail, or to reduce all the phenomena to this one general law. That Hobbes was in fact the original inventor of the doctrine of Association, and of the modern system of philosophy in general, is matter of fact and history; as to which, we are surprised that Mr. C. should profess any doubt, and which we had gratified ourselves by illustrating by a series of citations from his greater works,—which nothing but a sense of the prevailing indifference to such discussions prevents us from laying before our readers.
As for the great German oracle Kant, we must take the liberty to say, that his system appears to us the most wilful and monstrous absurdity that ever was invented. If the French theories of the mind were too chemical, this is too mechanical:—if the one referred every thing to nervous sensibility, the other refers every thing to the test of muscular resistance, and voluntary prowess. It is an enormous heap of dogmatical and hardened assertions, advanced in contradiction to all former systems, and all unsystematical opinions and impressions. He has but one method of getting over difficulties:—when he is at a loss to account for any thing, and cannot give a reason for it, he turns short round upon the inquirer, and says that it is self-evident. If he cannot make good an inference upon acknowledged premises, or known methods of reasoning, he coolly refers the whole to a new class of ideas, and the operation of some unknown faculty, which he has invented for the purpose, and which he assures you must exist,—because there is no other proof of it. His whole theory is machinery and scaffolding—an elaborate account of what he has undertaken to do, because no one else has been able to do it—and an assumption that he has done it, because he has undertaken it. If the will were to go for the deed, and to be confident were to be wise, he would indeed be the prince of philosophers. For example, he sets out with urging the indispensable necessity of answering Hume’s argument on the origin of our idea of cause and effect; and because he can find no answer to this argument, in the experimental philosophy, he affirms, that this idea must be ‘a self-evident truth, contained in the first forms or categories of the understanding;’ that is, the thing must be as he would have it, whether it is so or not. Again, he argues that external objects exist because they seem to exist; and yet he denies that we know any thing at all about the matter, further than their appearances. He defines beauty to be perfection, and virtue to consist in a conformity to our duty; with other such deliberate truisms; and then represents necessity as inconsistent with morality, and insists on the existence and certainty of the free-will as a faculty necessary to explain the moral sense, which could not exist without it. This transcendental philosopher is also pleased to affirm, in so many words, that we have neither any possible idea, nor any possible proof of the existence of the Soul, God, or Immortality, by means of the ordinary faculties of sense, understanding, or reason; and he therefore (like a man who had been employed to construct a machine for some particular purpose), invents a new faculty, for the admission and demonstration of these important truths, namely, the practical reason; in other words, the will or determination that these things should be infinitely true because they are infinitely desirable to the human mind,—though he says it is impossible for the human mind to have any idea whatever of these objects, either as true or desirable. But we turn gladly from absurdities that have not even the merit of being amusing; and leave Mr. Coleridge to the undisturbed adoration of an idol who will have few other worshippers in this country. His own speculations are, beyond all comparison, more engaging.