‘Like a worm goes by the way.’
He hears murmurs loud or suppressed, meets blank looks or scowling faces, is exposed to the pelting of the pitiless press, and is stunned by the shout of the mob, that gather round him to see what sort of a creature a poet and a philosopher is. What is there to make him proof against all this? A strength of understanding steeled against temptation, and a dear love of truth that smiles opinion to scorn? These he perhaps has not. A lord passes in his coach. Might he not get up, and ride out of the reach of the rabble-rout? He is invited to stop dinner. If he stays he may insinuate some wholesome truths. He drinks in rank poison—flattery! He recites some verses to the ladies, who smile delicious praise, and thank him through their tears. The master of the house suggests a happy allusion in the turn of an expression. ‘There’s sympathy.’ This is better than the company he lately left. Pictures, statues meet his raptured eye. Our Ulysses finds himself in the gardens of Alcinous: our truant is fairly caught. He wanders through enchanted ground. Groves, classic groves, nod unto him, and he hears ‘ancestral voices’ hailing him as brother-bard! He sleeps, dreams, and wakes cured of his thriftless prejudices and morose philanthropy. He likes this courtly and popular sympathy better. ‘He looks up with awe to kings; with honour to nobility; with reverence to magistrates,’ &c. He no longer breathes the air of heaven and his own thoughts, but is steeped in that of palaces and courts, and finds it agree better with his constitutional temperament. Oh! how sympathy alters a man from what he was!
‘I’ve heard of hearts unkind,
Kind deeds with coldness still returning;
Alas! the gratitude of man
Has oftener set me mourning.’
A spirit of contradiction, a wish to monopolise all wisdom, will not account for uniform consistency, for it is sure to defeat and turn against itself. It is ‘every thing by turns, and nothing long.’ It is warped and crooked. It cannot bear the least opposition, and sooner than acquiesce in what others approve it will change sides in a day. It is offended at every resistance to its captious, domineering humour, and will quarrel for straws with its best friends. A person under the guidance of this demon, if every whimsy or occult discovery of his own is not received with acclamation by one party, will wreak his spite by deserting to the other, and carry all his talent for disputation with him, sharpened by rage and disappointment. A man, to be steady in a cause, should be more attached to the truth than to the acquiescence of his fellow-citizens. A young student, who came up to town a few years since with some hypercritical refinements on the modern philosophy to introduce him to the Gamaliels of the age, but who would allow no one else to have a right view of the common doctrines of the school, or to be able to assign a reason for the faith that was in him, was sent to Coventry by the true adepts, who were many of them as wise and as fastidious as himself. He therefore turned round upon the whole set for this indignity, and has been playing off the heavy artillery of his scurrilous abuse, his verbal logic, and the powerful distinctions of the civil and canon law upon the devoted heads of his tasteless associates; ‘perpetual volley, arrowy sleet,’ ever since! It is needless to mention names. The learned gentleman having left his ungrateful party and unprofitable principles in dudgeon, has gone into the opposite extreme like mad, sticks at nothing, is callous to public opinion, so that he pleases his employers, and can become ‘a thorn in the side of freedom’; and fairly takes the bridle in his teeth, stop him who can. A more obstinate being never took pen in hand. Yet, by agreeing to his conclusions, and subscribing to his arguments (such as they are) it would be still possible to make him give up every one of his absurdities in succession, and to drive him to set up another New Daily Paper against himself!
I can hardly consider Mr. Coleridge as a deserter from the cause he first espoused, unless one could tell what cause he ever heartily espoused, or what party he ever belonged to, in downright earnest. He has not been inconsistent with himself at different times, but at all times. He is a sophist, a casuist, a rhetorician, what you please; and might have argued or declaimed to the end of his breath on one side of a question or another, but he never was a pragmatical fellow. He lived in a round of contradictions, and never came to a settled point. His fancy gave the cue to his judgment, and his vanity set his invention afloat in whatever direction he could find most scope for it, or most sympathy, that is, admiration. His Life and Opinions might naturally receive the title of one of Hume’s Essays—‘A Sceptical Solution of Sceptical Doubts.’ To be sure, his Watchman and his Friend breathe a somewhat different tone on subjects of a particular description, both of them apparently pretty high-raised, but whoever will be at the pains to examine them closely, will find them to be voluntaries, fugues, solemn capriccios, not set compositions with any malice prepense in them, or much practical meaning. I believe some of his friends, who were indebted to him for the suggestion of plausible reasons for conformity, and an opening to a more qualified view of the letter of their paradoxical principles, have lately disgusted him by the virulence and extravagance to which they have carried hints, of which he never suspected that they would make the least possible use. But if Mr. Coleridge is satisfied with the wandering Moods of his Mind, perhaps this is no reason that others may not reap the solid benefit. He himself is like the idle sea-weed on the ocean, tossed from shore to shore: they are like barnacles fastened to the vessel of state, rotting its goodly timbers!
There are some persons who are of too fastidious a turn of mind to like any thing long, or to assent twice to the same opinion. —— always sets himself to prop the falling cause, to nurse the ricketty bantling. He takes the part which he thinks in most need of his support, not so much out of magnanimity, as to prevent too great a degree of presumption or self-complacency on the triumphant side. ‘Though truth be truth, yet he contrives to throw such changes of vexation on it as it may lose some colour.’ I have been delighted to hear him expatiate with the most natural and affecting simplicity on a favourite passage or picture, and all the while afraid of agreeing with him, lest he should instantly turn round and unsay all that he had said, for fear of my going away with too good an opinion of my own taste, or too great an admiration of my idol—and his own. I dare not ask his opinion twice, if I have got a favourable sentence once, lest he should belie his own sentiments to stagger mine. I have heard him talk divinely (like one inspired) of Boccaccio, and the story of the Pot of Basil, describing ‘how it grew, and it grew, and it grew,’ till you saw it spread its tender leaves in the light of his eye, and wave in the tremulous sound of his voice; and yet if you asked him about it at another time, he would, perhaps, affect to think little of it, or to have forgotten the circumstance. His enthusiasm is fickle and treacherous. The instant he finds it shared in common, he backs out of it. His enmity is equally refined, but hardly so unsocial. His exquisitely turned invectives display all the beauty of scorn, and impart elegance to vulgarity. He sometimes finds out minute excellencies, and cries up one thing to put you out of conceit with another. If you want him to praise Sir Joshua con amore, in his best manner, you should begin with saying something about Titian—if you seem an idoliser of Sir Joshua, he will immediately turn off the discourse, gliding like the serpent before Eve, wary and beautiful, to the graces of Sir Peter Lely, or ask if you saw a Vandyke the other day, which he does not think Sir Joshua could stand near. But find fault with the Lake Poets, and mention some pretended patron of rising genius, and you need not fear but he will join in with you and go all lengths that you can wish him. You may calculate upon him there. ‘Pride elevates, and joy brightens his face.’ And, indeed, so eloquent is he, and so beautiful in his eloquence, that I myself, with all my freedom from gall and bitterness, could listen to him untired, and without knowing how the time went, losing and neglecting many a meal and hour,
——‘From morn to noon,