It is well for the author of this tragedy that it has been praised in the Quarterly Review,—or we should not wonder to see Mr. Coleridge, as well from these lines as from its being acted with universal applause at the Theatre Royal Covent Garden, set about proving it to be a very ultra-Jacobinical performance.—But ‘to leave this keen encounter of the wits, and fall to something of a slower method.’ The reason—(for Mr. Coleridge knows, that if we have not ‘reason as plenty as blackberries,’ yet what we have, we are ready ‘to give to any man without compulsion’)—the reason why Mr. Coleridge is not what he might be, is, that he would be thought what he is not. His motto is, to be nothing or every thing. His levity or his vanity is not satisfied with being admired for what he is, but for all that he is capable of becoming, wise or foolish, knave or not. He is not contented to be ‘the inconstant moon,’ unless he can be the halo round it. He would glitter in the sunshine of public favour, and yet he would cast no shadow. Please all and please none is his rule, he has succeeded. He thinks it a great disparagement of his parts, a proof of a narrow and contracted mind, to be thought to hold only the sentiments which he professes. His capacious mind has room for all opinions, both those which he believes and those which he does not. He thinks he shews the greatest magnanimity when he shews the greatest contempt for his own principles, past, present, and to come. He would be esteemed greatly superior, not only to the rest of the world, but to himself. Would any one catch him in the trammels of a sect? Would any one make him swear to the dogmas of a party? Would any one suppose that he has any prejudices in favour of his own notions? That he is blindly wedded to one single view of a subject, as a man is wedded to one wife? He is shocked at any such imputation of intellectual uxoriousness. Would the Presbyterians try to hook him in?—he knows better than Socinus or old John Knox. Would the Established Church receive him at her wide portals?—he carries too great a weight of the Fathers and school divinity at his back. Would the Whigs patronise him?—he is too straitened in antiquated notions and traditional prejudices. Would the Tories take him in?—he is too liberal, enlightened, and transcendental for them. Would principle bind him?—he shuffles out of it, as a clog upon his freedom of thought, ‘his large discourse of reason, looking before and after.’ Would interest lay dirty hands upon him?—he jockies her too by some fetch or conundrum, borrowed from the great clerks of the so-called Dark Ages. You can no more know where to have him than an otter. You might as well hedge the cuckoo. You see him now squat like a toad at the ear of the Courier; and oh! that we could rouse him up once more into an archangel’s shape. But what is it to him what so poor a thing as he himself is, who is sublimely indifferent to all other things, and who may be looked upon as a terrible petrification of religion, genius, and the love of liberty. Yet it is too much to think that he who began his career with two Sonnets to Lord Stanhope and Mary Wolstonecraft, in the Morning Chronicle, should end with slimy, drivelling abuse of Jacobinism and the French Revolution, in the Courier;—that, like some devoted fanatic, he should seek the praise of martyrdom by mangling his own soul with a prostituted, unpaid-for pen, and let out his last breath as a pander to that which would be a falsehood, but that it means nothing.
CHILDE HAROLD’S PILGRIMAGE (Canto iv.)
| The Yellow Dwarf.] | [May 2, 1818. |
‘I do perceive a fury in your words, but nothing wherefore.’
The fourth and last canto of Childe Harold has disappointed us. It is a falling off from the three former ones. We have read it carefully through, but it has left only the same impression on our minds that a troubled dream does,—as disturbed, as confused, as disjointed, as harassing, and as unprofitable. It is an indigestion of the mind. It is the lassitude or feverish tossing and tumbling of the imagination, after having taken a surfeit of pleasure, and fed upon the fumes of pride. Childe Harold is a spoiled child of the Muses—and of Fortune. He looks down upon human life, not more with the superiority of intellect than with the arrogance of birth. The poet translates the lord into high sounding and supercilious verse. It is Agamemnon and Thersites in one person. The common events and calamities of the world afford matter for the effusions of his spleen, while they seem resented as affronts to his personal dignity.
‘And as the soldiers’ bare dead bodies lay,
He called them untaught knaves, unmannerly,
To bring a slovenly, unhandsome corse
Betwixt the wind and his nobility.’
So when ‘the very age and body of the time’ comes between his Lordship’s speculative notions and hereditary prejudices, he stops the nose at it, and plays some very fantastic tricks before the public, who are lookers-on. In general, the idle wants, the naughty airs, the ill humours and ennui, the contempt for others, and disgust at themselves, common to exalted birth and station, are suffered to corrupt and stagnate in the blood that inherits them;—they are a disease in the flesh, an obstinate tumour in the mind, a cloud upon the brow, a venom that vents itself in hateful looks and peevish words to those about them; but in this poem and this author they have acquired ‘an understanding and a tongue,’—are sublimed by imagination, systematised by sophistry—mount the steps of the Capitol, fulmine over Greece, and are poured in torrents of abuse on the world. It is well if the world like it—we are tired of the monotony of his Lordship’s griefs, of which we can perceive neither beginning nor end. ‘They are begot of nothing, born of nothing.’ He volunteers his own Pilgrimage,—appoints his own penance,—makes his own confession,—and all—for nothing. He is in despair, because he has nothing to complain of—miserable, because he is in want of nothing. ‘He has tasted of all earth’s bliss, both living and loving,’ and therefore he describes himself as suffering the tortures of the damned. He is in love with misery, because he has possessed every enjoyment; and because he has had his will in every thing, is inconsolable because he cannot have impossibilities. His Lordship, in fact, makes out his own hard case to be, that he has attained all those objects that the rest of the world admire; that he has met with none of those disasters which embitter their lives; and he calls upon us to sympathise with his griefs and his despair.