Life at Highgate-Renewed activity-Publications and re-publications--The
_Biographia Literaria_--The lectures of 1818-Coleridge as a
Shakespearian critic.
[1816-1818.]
The results of the step which Coleridge had just taken became speedily
visible in more ways than one, and the public were among the first to
derive benefit from it. For not only was he stimulated to greater
activity of production, but his now more methodical way of life gave
him time and inclination for that work of arrangement and preparation
for the press which, distasteful to most writers, was no doubt
especially irksome to him, and thus insured the publication of many
pieces which otherwise might never have seen the light. The appearance
of _Christabel_ was, as we have said, received with signal marks of
popular favour, three editions being called for and exhausted in the
same year. In 1816 there appeared also The Statesman's Manual; or the
Bible the best guide to Political Skill and Foresight: a Lay Sermon
addressed to the higher classes of Society, with an Appendix containing
Comments and Essays connected with the Study of the Inspired Writings;
in 1817, another _Lay Sermon addressed to the higher and middle classes
on the existing distresses and discontents;_ and in the same year
followed the most important publication of this period, the _Biographia
Literaria_.
In 1817, too, it was that Coleridge at last made his long-meditated
collection and classification of his already published poems, and that
for the first time something approaching to a complete edition of the
poet's works was given to the world. The _Sibylline Leaves_, as this
reissue was called, had been intended to be preceded by another volume
of verse, and "accordingly on the printer's signatures of every sheet
we find Vol. II, appearing." Too characteristically, however, the
scheme was abandoned, and Volume II. emerged from the press without any
Volume I. to accompany it. The drama of _Zapolya_ followed in the same
year, and proved more successful with the public than with the critic
of Drury Lane. The "general reader" assigned no "ludicrous objections
to its metaphysics;" on the contrary, he took them on trust, as his
generous manner is, and _Zapolya_, published thus as a Christmas tale,
became so immediately popular that two thousand copies were sold in six
weeks. In the year 1818 followed the three-volume selection of essays
from the _Friend_, a reissue to which reference has already been made.
With the exception of _Christabel_, however, all the publications of
these three years unfortunately proceeded from the house of Gale and
Fenner, a firm which shortly afterwards became bankrupt; and Coleridge
thus lost all or nearly all of the profits of their sale.
The most important of the new works of this period was, as has been
said, the _Biographia Literaria_, or, to give it its other title,
_Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life and Opinions_. Its interest,
however, is wholly critical and illustrative; as a narrative it would
be found extremely disappointing and probably irritating by the average
reader. With the exception of one or two incidental disclosures, but
little biographical information is to be derived from it which is not
equally accessible from sources independent of the author; and the
almost complete want of sequence and arrangement renders it a very
inconvenient work of reference even for these few biographical details.
Its main value is to be found in the contents of seven chapters, from
the fourteenth to the twentieth; but it is not going too far to say
that, in respect of these, it is literally priceless. No such analysis
of the principles of poetry--no such exact discrimination of what was
sound in the modern "return-to-nature" movement from what was
false--has ever been accomplished by any other critic, or with such
admirable completeness by this consummate critic at any other time.
Undoubtedly it is not of the light order of reading; none, or very
little, of Coleridge's prose is. The whole of chapter xv., for
instance, in which the specific elements of "poetic power" are
"distinguished from general talent determined to poetic composition by
accidental motives," requires a close and sustained effort of the
attention, but those who bestow it will find it amply re-paid. I know
of no dissertation conceived and carried out in terms of the abstract
which in the result so triumphantly justifies itself upon application
to concrete cases, As regards the question of poetic expression, and
the laws by which its true form is determined, Coleridge's analysis is,
it seems to me, final. I cannot, at least, after the most careful
reflection upon it, conceive it as being other than the absolutely last
word on the subject. Reasoning and illustration are alike so convincing
that the reader, like the contentious student who listened unwillingly
to his professor's demonstration of the first proposition of Euclid, is
compelled to confess that "he has nothing to reply." To the judicious
admirer of Wordsworth, to every one who, while recognising Wordsworth's
inestimable services to English literature as the leader of the
naturalist reaction in poetry, has yet been vaguely conscious of the
defect in his poetic theory, and very keenly conscious of the vices of
his poetic practice,--to all such persons it must be a profound relief
and satisfaction to be guided as unerringly as Coleridge guides them to
the "parting of the ways" of truth and falsity in Wordsworth's
doctrines, and to be enabled to perceive that nothing which has
offended him in that poet's thought and diction has any real connection
with whatever in the poet's principles has commanded his assent. There
is no one who has ever felt uneasy under the blasphemies of the enemy
but must entertain deep gratitude for so complete a discharge as
Coleridge has procured him from the task of defending such lines as
"And I have travelled far as Hull to see
What clothes he might have left or other property."
Defend them indeed the ordinary reader probably would not, preferring
even the abandonment of his theory to a task so humiliating. But the
theory has so much of truth and value in it that the critic who has
redeemed it from the discredit of Wordsworth's misapplications of it is
entitled to the thanks of every friend of simplicity, who is at the
same time an enemy of bathos. There is no longer any reason to treat
the deadly commonplaces, amid which we toil through so many pages of
the _Excursion_, as having any true theoretic affinity with its but too
occasional majestic interludes. The smooth square-cut blocks of prose
which insult the natural beauty of poetic rock and boulder even in such
a scene of naked moorland grandeur as that of _Resolution and
Independence_ are seen and shown to be the mere intruders which we have
all felt them to be. To the Wordsworthian, anxious for a full
justification of the faith that is in him, the whole body of
Coleridge's criticism on his friend's poetry in the _Biographia
Literaria_ may be confidently recommended. The refutation of what is
untenable in Wordsworth's theory, the censure pronounced upon certain
characteristics of his practice, are made all the more impressive by
the tone of cordial admiration which distinguishes every personal
reference to the poet himself, and by the unfailing discrimination with
which the critic singles out the peculiar beauties of his poetry. No
finer selection of finely characteristic Wordsworthian passages could
perhaps have been made than those which Coleridge has quoted in
illustration of his criticisms in the eighteenth and two following
chapters of the _Biographia Literaria_. For the rest, however, unless
indeed one excepts the four chapters on the Hartleian system and its
relation to the German school of philosophy, the book is rather one to
be dipped into for the peculiar pleasure which an hour in Coleridge's
company must always give to any active intelligence, than to be
systematically studied with a view to perfecting one's conception of
Coleridge's philosophical and critical genius considered in its
totality.
As to the two lay sermons, the less ambitious of them is decidedly the
more successful. The advice to "the higher and middle classes" on the
existing distresses and discontents contains at least an ingredient of
the practical; its distinctively religious appeals are varied by sound
political and economical arguments; and the enumeration and exposure of
the various artifices by which most orators are accustomed to delude
their hearers is as masterly as only Coleridge could have made it. Who
but he, for instance, could have thrown a piece of subtle observation
into a form in which reason and fancy unite so happily to impress it on
the mind as in the following passage: "The mere appeal to the auditors,
whether the arguments are not such that none but an idiot or an
hireling could resist, is an effective substitute for any argument at
all. For mobs have no memories. They are in nearly the same state as
that of an individual when he makes what is termed a bull. _The
passions, like a fused metal, fill up the wide interstices of thought
and supply the defective links; and thus incompatible assertions are
harmonised by the sensation, without the sense of connection_." The
other lay sermon, however, the _Statesman's Manual_, is less
appropriately conceived. Its originating proposition, that the Bible is
"the best guide to political skill and foresight," is undoubtedly open
to dispute, but might nevertheless be capable of plausible defence upon
_à priori_ grounds. Coleridge, however, is not content with this
method of procedure; as, indeed, with so avowedly practical an object
in view he scarcely could be, for a "manual" is essentially a work
intended for the constant consultation of the artificer in the actual
performance of his work, and ought at least to contain illustrations of
the application of its general principles to particular cases. It is in
undertaking to supply these that the essential mysticism of Coleridge's
counsels comes to light. For instance: "I am deceived if you will not
be compelled to admit that the prophet Isaiah revealed the true
philosophy of the French Revolution more than two thousand years before
it became a sad irrevocable truth of history. 'And thou saidst, I shall
be a lady for ever, so that thou didst not lay these things to thy
heart neither didst remember the latter end of it.... Therefore shall
evil come upon thee; thou shalt not know from whence it riseth, etc.'"
And to this ast-quoted sentence Coleridge actually appends the
following note: "The reader will scarcely fail to find in this verse a
remembrancer of the sudden setting in of the frost before the usual
time (in a country, too, where the commencement of its two seasons is
in general scarcely less regular than that of the wet and dry seasons
between the tropics) which caused, and the desolation which
accompanied, the flight from Moscow." One can make no other comment
upon this than that if it really
be wisdom which statesmen would do well to lay to heart, the late Dr.
Cumming must have been the most profound instructor in statesmanship
that the world has ever seen. A prime minister of real life, however,
could scarcely be seriously recommended to shape his policy upon a due
consideration of the possible allegoric meaning of a passage in Isaiah,
to say nothing of the obvious objection that this kind of appeal to
_Sortes Biblicæ_ is dangerously liable to be turned against those who
recommend it. On the whole, one must say of this lay sermon that it
justifies the apprehension expressed by the author in its concluding
pages. It does rather "resemble the overflow of an earnest mind than an
orderly and premeditated," in the sense, at any rate, of a
well-considered "composition."
In the month of January 1818 Coleridge once more commenced the delivery
of a course of lectures in London. The scope of this series-fourteen in
number was, as will be seen from the subjoined syllabus, an immensely
comprehensive one. The subject of the first was "the manners, morals,
literature, philosophy, religion, and state of society in general in
European Christendom, from the eighth to the fifteenth century;" and of
the second "the tales and metrical romances common for the most part to
England, Germany, and the north of France; and English songs and
ballads continued to the reign of Charles I." In the third the lecturer
proposed to deal with the poetry of Chaucer and Spenser, of Petrarch,
and of Ariosto, Pulci, and Boiardo. The fourth, fifth, and sixth were
to be devoted to the dramatic works of Shakespeare, and to comprise the
substance of Coleridge's former courses on the same subject, "enlarged
and varied by subsequent study and reflection." In the seventh he was
to treat of the other principal dramatists of the Elizabethan period,
Ben Jonson, Massinger, and Beaumont and Fletcher; in the eighth of the
life and all the works of Cervantes; in the ninth of Rabelais, Swift,
and Sterne, with a dissertation "on the nature and constituents of
genuine humour, and on the distinctions of humorous from the witty, the
fanciful, the droll, the odd, etc." Donne, Dante, and Milton formed the
subject of the tenth; the _Arabian Nights Entertainment_, and the
_romantic_ use of the supernatural in poetry, that of the eleventh. The
twelfth was to be on "tales of witches and apparitions, etc.," as
distinguished from magic and magicians of Asiatic origin; and the
thirteenth,--"on colour, sound, and form in nature, as connected with
Poesy--the word 'Poesy' being used as the generic or class term
including poetry, music, painting, statuary, and ideal architecture as
its species, the reciprocal relations of poetry and philosophy to each
other, and of both to religion and the moral sense.'" In the fourteenth
and final lecture Coleridge proposed to discuss "the corruptions of the
English language since the reign of Queen Anne, in our style of writing
prose," and to formulate "a few easy rules for the attainment of a
manly, unaffected, and pure language in our genuine mother tongue,
whether for the purposes of writing, oratory, or conversation."
These lectures, says Mr. Gillman, were from Coleridge's own account
more profitable than any he had before given, though delivered in an
unfavourable situation; a lecture-room in Flower de Luce Court, which,
however, being near the Temple, secured to him the benefit--if benefit
it were--of a considerable number of law students among his auditors.
It was the first time that his devoted guardian had ever heard him in
public, and he reports the significant fact that though Coleridge
lectured from notes, which he had carefully made, "it was obvious that
his audience were more delighted when, putting his notes aside, he
spoke extempore...." He was brilliant, fluent, and rapid; his words
seemed to flow as from a person repeating with grace and energy some
delightful poem. If he sometimes paused, it was not for the want of
words, but that he was seeking their most appropriate or most logical
arrangement.
An incident related with extreme, though in a great measure
unconscious, drollery by Mr. Gillman in connection with a lecture
delivered at this period is to my mind of more assistance than many of
the accounts of his "lay sermons" in private circles, in enabling us to
comprehend one element of Coleridge's marvellous powers of discourse.
Early one morning at Mr. Gillman's he received two letters-one to
inform him that he was expected that same evening to deliver a lecture,
at the rooms of the London Philosophical Society, to an audience of
some four or five hundred persons; the other containing a list of the
previous lecturers and the lectures delivered by them during the course
of the season. At seven o'clock in the evening Coleridge and Mr.
Gillman went up to town to make some inquiries respecting this
unexpected application; but, on arriving at the house of the gentleman
who had written the letter, they were informed that he was not at home,
but would return at eight o'clock--the hour fixed for the commencement
of the lecture. They then proceeded to the Society's rooms, where in
due time the audience assembled; and the committee having at last
entered and taken their places on the seats reserved for them, "Mr.
President arose from the centre of the group, and, putting on a
'president's hat,' which so disfigured him that we could scarcely
refrain from laughter, addressed the company in these words: This
evening Mr. Coleridge will deliver a lecture on 'the Growth of the
Individual Mind.'" Coleridge at first "seemed startled," as well he
might, and turning round to Mr. Gillman whispered: "A pretty stiff
subject they have chosen for me." However, he instantly mounted his
standing-place and began without hesitation, previously requesting his
friend to observe the effect of his lecture on the audience. It was
agreed that, should he appear to fail, Gillman was to "clasp his ancle;
but that he was to continue for an hour if the countenances of his
auditors indicated satisfaction." Coleridge then began his address in
these words: "The lecture I am about to give this evening is purely
extempore. Should you find a nominative case looking out for a verb, or
a fatherless verb for a nominative case, you must excuse it. It is
purely extempore, though I have read and thought much on the subject."
At this the company smiled, which seemed to inspire the lecturer with
confidence. He plunged at once into his lecture--and most brilliant,
eloquent, and logically consecutive it was. The time moved on so
swiftly that Mr. Gillman found, on looking at his watch, that an hour
and a half had passed away, and, therefore, he continues "waiting only
a desirable moment--to use his own playful words--I prepared myself to
punctuate his oration. As previously agreed, I pressed his ancle, and
thus gave him the hint he had requested; when, bowing graciously, and
with a benevolent and smiling countenance, he presently descended. The
lecture was quite new to me, and I believe quite new to himself so far
as the arrangement of his words was concerned. The floating thoughts
were beautifully arranged, and delivered on the spur of the moment.
What accident gave rise to the singular request, that he should deliver
this lecture impromptu, I never learnt; nor did it signify, as it
afforded a happy opportunity to many of witnessing in part the extent
of his reading and the extraordinary strength of his powers."
It is tantalising to think that no record of this remarkable
performance remains; but, indeed, the same may to some extent be said,
and in various degrees, of nearly all the lectures which Coleridge ever
delivered. With the exception of seven out of the fifteen of 1811,
which were published in 1856 by Mr. Payne Collier from shorthand notes
taken at the time, Coleridge's lectures scarcely exist for us otherwise
than in the form of rough preparatory notes. A few longer pieces, such
as the admirable observations in the second volume of the _Literary
Remains_, on poetry, on the Greek drama, and on the progress of the
dramatic art in England, are, with the exception above noticed, almost
the only general disquisitions on these subjects which appear to have
reached us in a complete state. Of the remaining contents of the
volume, including the detailed criticisms now textual, now analytic--of
the various plays of Shakespeare, a considerable portion is frankly
fragmentary, pretending, indeed, to no other character than that of
mere marginalia. This, however, does not destroy--I had almost said it
does not even impair--their value. It does but render them all the more
typical productions of a writer, whose greatest services to mankind in
almost every department of human thought and knowledge with which he
concerned himself were much the most often performed in the least
methodical way. In reading through these incomparable notes on
Shakespeare we soon cease to lament, or even to remember, their
unconnected form and often somewhat desultory appearance; if, indeed,
we do not see reason to congratulate ourselves that the annotator,
unfettered by the restraints which the composition of a systematic
treatise would have imposed upon him, is free to range with us at will
over many a flower-strewn field, for which otherwise he could not
perhaps have afforded to quit the main road of his subject. And this
liberty is the more welcome, because Coleridge, _primus inter pares_ as
a critic of any order of literature, is in the domain of Shakespearian
commentary absolute king. The principles of analysis which he was
charged with having borrowed without acknowledgment from Schlegel, with
whose Shakespearian theories he was at the time entirely unacquainted,
were in fact of his own excogitation. He owed nothing in this matter to
any individual German, nor had he anything in common with German
Shakespearianism except its profoundly philosophising spirit, which,
moreover, was in his case directed and restrained by other qualities,
too often wanting in critics of that industrious race; for he possessed
a sense of the ridiculous, a feeling for the poetic, a tact, a taste,
and a judgment, which would have saved many a worthy but heavy-handed
Teutonic professor, who should have been lucky enough to own these
gifts, from exposing himself and his science to the satire of the
light-minded. Very rarely, indeed, do we find Coleridge indulging _plus
'quo_ his passion for psychological analysis. Deeply as his criticism
penetrates, it is yet loyally recognitive of the opacity of milestones.
Far as he sees into his subject, we never find him fancying that he
sees beyond the point at which the faculty of human vision is
exhausted. His conception of the more complex of Shakespeare's
personages, his theory of their characters, his reading of their
motives, is often subtle, but always sane; his interpretation of the
master's own dealings with them, and of the language which he puts into
their mouths, is often highly imaginative, but it is rarely fanciful.
Take, as an illustration of the first-mentioned merit, the following
acute but eminently sensible estimate of the character of Polonius:--
"He is the personified memory of wisdom no longer actually possessed.
This admirable character is always misrepresented on the stage.
Shakspeare never intended to exhibit him as a buffoon; for although it
was natural for Hamlet--a young man of fire and genius, detesting
formality and disliking Polonius on political grounds, as imagining
that he had assisted his uncle in his usurpation--should express
himself satirically, yet this must not be taken exactly as the poet's
conception of him. In Polonius a certain induration of character had
arisen from long habits of business; but take his advice to Laertes,
and Ophelia's reverence for his memory, and we shall see that he was
meant to be represented as a statesman somewhat past his faculties--his
recollections of life all full of wisdom, and showing a knowledge of
human nature, while what immediately takes place before him and escapes
from him is indicative of weakness."
Or this comment on the somewhat faint individualisation of the figure
of Lear:
"In Lear old age is itself a character-natural imperfections being
increased by life-long habits of receiving a prompt obedience. Any
addition of individualisation would have been unnecessary and painful;
for the relation of others to him, of wondrous fidelity and of
frightful ingratitude, alone sufficiently distinguish him. Thus Lear
becomes the open and ample playroom of nature's passions."
Or lastly, in illustration of my second point, let us take this note on
the remark of the knight that "since my young lady's going into France
the fool hath much pined away ":--
"The fool is no comic buffoon--to make the groundlings laugh--no forced
condescension of Shakspeare's genius to the taste of his audience.
Accordingly the poet prepares us for the introduction, which he never
does with any of his common clowns and fools, by bringing him into
living connection with the pathos of the play. He is as wonderful a
creation as Caliban,--his wild babblings and inspired idiocy articulate
and gauge the horrors of the scene."
The subject is a tempting one to linger over, did not imperative
Exigencies of space compel me to pass on from it. There is much--very
much--more critical matter in the Literary Remains of which it is hard
to forbear quotation; and I may mention in particular the profoundly
suggestive remarks on the nature of the humorous, with their
accompanying analysis of the genius and artistic method of Sterne. But
it is, as has been said, in Shakespearian criticism that Coleridge's
unique mastery of all the tools of the critic is most conspicuous, and
it is in the brilliant, if unmethodised, pages which I have been
discussing that we may most readily find consolation for the too early
silencing of his muse. For these consummate criticisms are essentially
and above all the criticisms of a poet They are such as could not have
been achieved by any man not originally endowed with that divine gift
which was fated in this instance to expend itself within so few years.
Nothing, indeed, could more strikingly illustrate the commanding
advantage possessed by a poet interpreting a poet than is to be found
in Coleridge's occasional sarcastic comments on the _banalit‚s_ of
our national poet's most prosaic commentator, Warburton--the
"thought-swarming, but idealess Warburton," as he once felicitously
styles him. The one man seems to read his author's text under the
clear, diffused, unwavering radiance emitted from his own poetic
imagination; while the criticism of the other resembles a perpetual
scratching of damp matches, which ash a momentary light into one corner
of the dark assage, and then go out.