'Will sprawl, now that the heat of day is best,

Flat on his belly in the pit's much mire,

With elbows wide, fists clenched to prop his chin;

And, while he kicks both feet in the cool slush,

And feels about his spine small eft-things course,

Run in and out each arm, and make him laugh;

And while above his head a pompion-plant,

Coating the cave-top as a brow its eye,

Creeps down to touch and tickle hair and beard,

And now a flower drops with a bee inside,

And now a fruit to snap at, catch and crunch:

This pleasant creature proceeds to give his idea of the origin of the

Universe, and it is as follows. Caliban speaks in the third person,

and is of opinion that the maker of the Universe took to making it on

account of his personal discomfort:

Setebos, Setebos, and Setebos!

'Thinketh, He dwelleth i' the cold o' the moon.

'Thinketh He made it, with the sun to match,

But not the stars: the stars came otherwise;

Only made clouds, winds, meteors, such as that:

Also this isle, what lives, and grows thereon,

And snaky sea which rounds and ends the same.

'Thinketh, it came of being ill at ease:

He hated that He cannot change His cold,

Nor cure its ache. 'Hath spied an icy fish

That longed to 'scape the rock-stream where she lived,

And thaw herself within the lukewarm brine

O' the lazy sea her stream thrusts far amid,

A crystal spike 'twixt two warm walls of wave;

Only she ever sickened, found repulse

At the other kind of water, not her life,

(Green-dense and dim-delicious, bred o' the sun)

Flounced back from bliss she was not born to breathe,

And in her old bounds buried her despair,

Hating and loving warmth alike: so He.

'Thinketh, He made thereat the sun, this isle,

Trees and the fowls here, beast and creeping thing.

Yon otter, sleek-wet, black, lithe as a leech;

Yon auk, one fire-eye, in a ball of foam,

That floats and feeds; a certain badger brown

He hath watched hunt with that slant white-wedge eye

By moonlight; and the pie with the long tongue

That pricks deep into oakwarts for a worm,

And says a plain word when she finds her prize,

But will not eat the ants; the ants themselves

That build a wall of seeds and settled stalks

About their hole--He made all these and more,

Made all we see, and us, in spite: how else?

It may seem perhaps to most readers that these lines are very

difficult, and that they are unpleasant. And so they are. We quote

them to illustrate, not the _success_ of grotesque art, but the

_nature_ of grotesque art. It shows the end at which this species of

art aims, and if it fails, it is from over-boldness in the choice of a

subject by the artist, or from the defects of its execution. A

thinking faculty more in difficulties--a great type,--an inquisitive,

searching intellect under more disagreeable conditions, with worse

helps, more likely to find falsehood, less likely to find truth, can

scarcely be imagined. Nor is the mere description of the thought at

all bad: on the contrary, if we closely examine it, it is very clever.

Hardly any one could have amassed so many ideas at once nasty and

suitable. But scarcely any readers--any casual readers--who are not of

the sect of Mr. Browning's admirers will be able to examine it enough

to appreciate it. From a defect, partly of subject, and partly of

style, many of Mr. Browning's works make a demand upon the reader's

zeal and sense of duty to which the nature of most readers is unequal.

They have on the turf the convenient expression 'staying power': some

horses can hold on and others cannot. But hardly any reader not of

especial and peculiar nature can hold on through such composition.

There is not enough of 'staying power' in human nature. One of his

greatest admirers once owned to us that he seldom or never began a new

poem without looking on in advance, and foreseeing with caution what

length of intellectual adventure he was about to commence. Whoever

will work hard at such poems will find much mind in them: they are a

sort of quarry of ideas, but whoever goes there will find these ideas

in such a jagged, ugly, useless shape that he can hardly bear them.

We are not judging Mr. Browning simply from a hasty recent production.

All poets are liable to misconceptions, and if such a piece as

_Caliban upon Setebos_ were an isolated error, a venial and particular

exception, we should have given it no prominence. We have put it

forward because it just elucidates both our subject and the

characteristics of Mr. Browning. But many other of his best known

pieces do so almost equally; what several of his devotees think his

best piece is quite enough illustrative for anything we want. It

appears that on Holy Cross day at Rome the Jews were obliged to listen

to a Christian sermon in the hope of their conversion, though this is,

according to Mr. Browning, what they really said when they came away:

Fee, faw, fum! bubble and squeak!

Blessedest Thursday's the fat of the week,

Rumble and tumble, sleek and rough,

Stinking and savoury, smug and gruff,

Take the church-road, for the bell's due chime

Gives us the summons--'t is sermon-time.

Boh, here's Barnabas! Job, that's you?

Up stumps Solomon--bustling too?

Shame, man! greedy beyond your years

To handsel the bishop's shaving-shears?

Fair play's a jewel! leave friends in the lurch?

Stand on a line ere you start for the church.

Higgledy, piggledy, packed we lie,

Rats in a hamper, swine in a stye,

Wasps in a bottle, frogs in a sieve,

Worms in a carcase, fleas in a sleeve.

Hist! square shoulders, settle your thumbs

And buzz for the bishop--here he comes.

And after similar nice remarks for a church, the edified congregation

concludes:

But now, while the scapegoats leave our flock,

And the rest sit silent and count the clock,

Since forced to muse the appointed time

On these precious facts and truths sublime,--

Let us fitly employ it, under our breath,

In saying Ben Ezra's Song of Death.

For Rabbi Ben Ezra, the night he died,

Called sons and sons' sons to his side,

And spoke, 'This world has been harsh and strange;

Something is wrong: there needeth a change.

But what, or where? at the last, or first?

In one point only we sinned, at worst.

'The Lord will have mercy on Jacob yet,

And again in his border see Israel set.

When Judah beholds Jerusalem,

The stranger-seed shall be joined to them:

To Jacob's House shall the Gentiles cleave,

So the Prophet saith and his sons believe.

'Ay, the children of the chosen race

Shall carry and bring them to their place:

In the land of the Lord shall lead the same,

Bondsmen and handmaids. Who shall blame

When the slaves enslave, the oppressed ones o'er

The oppressor triumph for evermore?

'God spoke, and gave us the word to keep,

Bade never fold the hands nor sleep

'Mid a faithless world,--at watch and ward,

Till Christ at the end relieve our guard.

By His servant Moses the watch was set:

Though near upon cock-crow, we keep it yet.

'Thou! if Thou wast He, who at mid-watch came,

By the starlight, naming a dubious Name!

And if, too heavy with sleep--too rash

With fear--O Thou, if that martyr-gash

Fell on Thee coming to take Thine own,

And we gave the Cross, when we owed the Throne--

'Thou art the Judge. We are bruised thus.

But, the judgement over, join sides with us!

Thine too is the cause! and not more Thine

Than ours, is the work of these dogs and swine,

Whose life laughs through and spits at their creed,

Who maintain Thee in word, and defy Thee in deed!

'We withstood Christ then? be mindful how

At least we withstand Barabbas now!

Was our outrage sore? But the worst we spared,

To have called these--Christians, had we dared!

Let defiance to them pay mistrust of Thee,

And Rome make amends for Calvary!

'By the torture, prolonged from age to age,

By the infamy, Israel's heritage,

By the Ghetto's plague, by the garb's disgrace,

By the badge of shame, by the felon's place,

By the branding-tool, the bloody whip,

And the summons to Christian fellowship,--

'We boast our proof that at least the Jew

Would wrest Christ's name from the Devil's crew.

Thy face took never so deep a shade

But we fought them in it, God our aid!

A trophy to bear, as we march, Thy band,

South, East, and on to the Pleasant Land!'

It is very natural that a poet whose wishes incline, or whose genius

conducts him to a grotesque art, should be attracted towards mediaeval

subjects. There is no age whose legends are so full of grotesque

subjects, and no age where real life was so fit to suggest them. Then,

more than at any other time, good principles have been under great

hardships. The vestiges of ancient civilization, the germs of modern

civilization, the little remains of what had been, the small

beginnings of what is, were buried under a cumbrous mass of barbarism

and cruelty. Good elements hidden in horrid accompaniments are the

special theme of grotesque art, and these mediaeval life and legends

afford more copiously than could have been furnished before

Christianity gave its new elements of good, or since modern

civilization has removed some few at least of the old elements of

destruction. A _buried_ life like the spiritual mediaeval was Mr.

Browning's natural element, and he was right to be attracted by it.

His mistake has been, that he has not made it pleasant; that he has

forced his art to topics on which no one could charm, or on which he,

at any rate, could not; that on these occasions and in these poems he

has failed in fascinating men and women of sane taste.

We say 'sane' because there is a most formidable and estimable

_insane_ taste. The will has great though indirect power over the

taste, just as it has over the belief. There are some horrid beliefs

from which human nature revolts, from which at first it shrinks, to

which, at first, no effort can force it. But if we fix the mind upon

them they have a power over us just because of their natural

offensiveness. They are like the sight of human blood: experienced

soldiers tell us that at first men are sickened by the smell and

newness of blood almost to death and fainting, but that as soon as

they harden their hearts and stiffen their minds, as soon as they

_will_ bear it, then comes an appetite for slaughter, a tendency to

gloat on carnage, to love blood, at least for the moment, with a deep

eager love. It is a principle that if we put down a healthy

instinctive aversion, nature avenges herself by creating an unhealthy

insane attraction. For this reason the most earnest truth-seeking men

fall into the worst delusions; they will not let their mind alone;

they force it towards some ugly thing, which a crotchet of argument, a

conceit of intellect recommends, and nature punishes their disregard

of her warning by subjection to the ugly one, by belief in it. Just so

the most industrious critics get the most admiration. They think it

unjust to rest in their instinctive natural horror: they overcome it,

and angry nature gives them over to ugly poems and marries them to

detestable stanzas.

Mr. Browning possibly, and some of the worst of Mr. Browning's

admirers certainly, will say that these grotesque objects exist in

real life, and therefore they ought to be, at least may be, described

in art. But though pleasure is not the end of poetry, pleasing is a

condition of poetry. An exceptional monstrosity of horrid ugliness

cannot be made pleasing, except it be made to suggest--to recall--the

perfection, the beauty, from which it is a deviation. Perhaps in

extreme cases no art is equal to this; but then such self-imposed

problems should not be worked by the artist; these out-of-the-way and

detestable subjects should be let alone by him. It is rather

characteristic of Mr. Browning to neglect this rule. He is the most of

a realist, and the least of an idealist of any poet we know. He

evidently sympathizes with some part at least of Bishop Blougram's

apology. Anyhow this world exists. 'There _is_ good wine--there _are_

pretty women--there _are_ comfortable benefices--there _is_ money, and

it is pleasant to spend it. Accept the creed of your age and you get

these, reject that creed and you lose them. And for what do you lose

them? For a fancy creed of your own, which no one else will accept,

which hardly any one will call a "creed", which most people will

consider a sort of unbelief.' Again, Mr. Browning evidently loves what

we may call the realism, the grotesque realism, of orthodox

christianity. Many parts of it in which great divines have felt keen

difficulties are quite pleasant to him. He must _see_ his religion, he

must nave an 'object-lesson' in believing. He must have a creed that

will _take_, which wins and holds the miscellaneous world, which stout

men will heed, which nice women will adore. The spare moments of

solitary religion--the 'obdurate questionings', the high 'instincts',

the 'first affections', the 'shadowy recollections',

Which, do they what they may,

Are yet the fountain-light of all our day--

Are yet a master-light of all our seeing;

the great but vague faith--the unutterable tenets seem to him

worthless, visionary; they are not enough immersed in matter; they

move about 'in worlds not realized'. We wish he could be tried like

the prophet once; he would have found God in the earthquake and the

storm; he could have deciphered from them a bracing and a rough

religion: he would have known that crude men and ignorant women felt

them too, and he would accordingly have trusted them; but he would

have distrusted and disregarded the 'still small voice'; he would have

said it was 'fancy'--a thing you thought you heard to-day, but were

not sure you had heard to-morrow: he would call it a nice illusion, an

immaterial prettiness; he would ask triumphantly 'How are you to get

the mass of men to heed this little thing?' he would have persevered

and insisted '_My wife_ does not hear it'.

But although a suspicion of beauty, and a taste for ugly reality, have

led Mr. Browning to exaggerate the functions, and to caricature the

nature of grotesque art, we own or rather we maintain that he has

given many excellent specimens of that art within its proper

boundaries and limits. Take an example, his picture of what we may

call the _bourgeois_ nature in _difficulties_; in the utmost

difficulty, in contact with magic and the supernatural. He has made of

it something homely, comic, true; reminding us of what _bourgeois_

nature really is. By showing us the type under abnormal conditions,

he reminds us of the type under its best and most satisfactory

conditions--

Hamelin Town's in Brunswick,

By famous Hanover city;

The river Weser, deep and wide,

Washes its walls on the southern side;

A pleasanter spot you never spied;

But, when begins my ditty,

Almost five hundred years ago,

To see the townsfolk suffer so

From vermin was a pity.

Rats!

They fought the dogs, and killed the cats,

And bit the babies in the cradles,

And ate the cheeses out of the vats,

And licked the soup from the cook's own ladles,

Split open the kegs of salted sprats,

Made nests inside men's Sunday hats,

And even spoiled the women's chats

By drowning their speaking

With shrieking and squeaking

In fifty different sharps and flats.

At last the people in a body

To the Town Hall came flocking:

''Tis clear', cried they, 'our Mayor's a noddy;

And as for our Corporation--shocking

To think we buy gowns lined with ermine

For dolts that can't or won't determine

What's best to rid us of our vermin!

You hope, because you're old and obese,

To find in the furry civic robe ease?

Rouse up, Sirs! Give your brains a racking

To find the remedy we're lacking,

Or, sure as fate, we'll send you packing!'

At this the Mayor and Corporation

Quaked with a mighty consternation.

A person of musical abilities proposes to extricate the civic

dignitaries from the difficulty, and they promise him a thousand

guilders if he does.

Into the street the Piper stept,

Smiling first a little smile,

As if he knew what magic slept

In his quiet pipe the while;

Then, like a musical adept,

To blow the pipe his lips he wrinkled,

And green and blue his sharp eye twinkled

Like a candle-flame where salt is sprinkled;

And ere three shrill notes the pipe uttered

You heard as if an army muttered;

And the muttering grew to a grumbling;

And the grumbling grew to a mighty rumbling;

And out of the houses the rats came tumbling.

Great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats,

Brown rats, black rats, grey rats, tawny rats,

Grave old plodders, gay young friskers,

Fathers, mothers, uncles, cousins,

Cooking tails and pricking whiskers,

Families by tens and dozens,

Brothers, sisters, husbands, wives--

Followed the Piper for their lives.

From street to street he piped advancing,

And step for step they followed dancing,

Until they came to the river Weser,

Wherein all plunged and perished!

--Save one who, stout as Julius Cæsar,

Swam across and lived to carry

(As he, the manuscript he cherished)

To Rat-land home his commentary:

Which was, 'At the first shrill notes of the pipe,

I heard a sound as of scraping tripe,

And putting apples, wondrous ripe,

Into a cider-press's gripe:

And a moving away of pickle-tub boards,

And a leaving ajar of conserve-cupboards,

And a drawing the corks of train-oil flasks,

And a breaking the hoops of butter-casks:

And it seemed as if a voice

(Sweeter far than by harp or by psaltery

Is breathed) called out, "Oh rats, rejoice!

The world is grown to one vast drysaltery!

So, munch on, crunch on, take your nuncheon,

Breakfast, supper, dinner, luncheon!"

And just as a bulky sugar-puncheon,

All ready staved, like a great sun shone

Glorious scarce an inch before me,

Just as methought it said, "Come, bore me!"

--I found the Weser rolling o'er me.'

You should have heard the Hamelin people

Ringing the bells till they rocked the steeple.

'Go', cried the Mayor, 'and get long poles,

Poke out the nests and block up the holes!

Consult with carpenters and builders,

And leave in our town not even a trace

Of the rats!'--when suddenly, up the face

Of the Piper perked in the market-place,

With a 'First, if you please, my thousand guilders!'

A thousand guilders! The Mayor looked blue;

So did the Corporation too.

For council dinners made rare havoc

With Claret, Moselle, Vin-de-Grave, Hock;

And half the money would replenish

Their cellar's biggest butt with Rhenish.

To pay this sum to a wandering fellow

With a gipsy coat of red and yellow!

'Beside,' quoth the Mayor with a knowing wink,

'Our business was done at the river's brink;

We saw with our eyes the vermin sink,

And what's dead can't come to life, I think.

So, friend, we're not the folks to shrink

From the duty of giving you something for drink,

And a matter of money to put in your poke;

But as for the guilders, what we spoke

Of them, as you very well know, was in joke.

Besides, our losses have made us thrifty.

A thousand guilders! Come, take fifty!'

The piper's face fell, and he cried,

'No trifling! I can't wait, beside!

I've promised to visit by dinner time

Bagdat, and accept the prime

Of the Head-Cook's pottage, all he's rich in,

For having left, in the Caliph's kitchen,

Of a nest of scorpions no survivor--

With him I proved no bargain-driver,

With you, don't think I'll bate a stiver!

And folks who put me in a passion

May find me pipe to another fashion.'

'How?' cried the Mayor, 'd'ye think I'll brook

Being worse treated than a Cook?

Insulted by a lazy ribald

With idle pipe and vesture piebald?

You threaten us, fellow? Do your worst,

Blow your pipe there till you burst!'

Once more he stept into the street

And to his lips again

Laid his long pipe of smooth straight cane;

And ere he blew three notes (such sweet

Soft notes as yet musician's cunning

Never gave the enraptured air)

There was a rustling, that seemed like a bustling

Of merry crowds justling at pitching and hustling.

Small feet were pattering, wooden shoes clattering,

Little hands clapping and little tongues chattering,

And, like fowls in a farm-yard when barley is scattering,

Out came the children running.

All the little boys and girls,

With rosy cheeks and flaxen curls,

And sparkling eyes and teeth like pearls.

Tripping and skipping ran merrily after

The wonderful music with shouting and laughter.

* * * * *

And I must not omit to say

That in Transylvania there's a tribe

Of alien people that ascribe

The outlandish ways and dress

On which their neighbours lay such stress,

To their fathers and mothers having risen

Out of some subterraneous prison

Into which they were trepanned

Long time ago in a mighty band

Out of Hamelin town in Brunswick land,

But how or why, they don't understand.

Something more we had to say of Mr. Browning, but we must stop. It is

singularly characteristic of this age that the poems which rise to the

surface should be examples of ornate art, and grotesque art, not of

pure art. We live in the realm of the _half_ educated. The number of

readers grows daily, but the quality of readers does not improve

rapidly. The middle class is scattered, headless; it is well-meaning

but aimless; wishing to be wise, but ignorant how to be wise. The

aristocracy of England never was a literary aristocracy, never even in

the days of its full power, of its unquestioned predominance, did it

guide--did it even seriously try to guide--the taste of England.

Without guidance young men and tired men are thrown amongst a mass of

books; they have to choose which they like; many of them would much

like to improve their culture, to chasten their taste, if they knew

how. But left to themselves they take, not pure art, but showy art;

not that which permanently relieves the eye and makes it happy

whenever it looks, and as long as it looks, but _glaring_ art which

catches and arrests the eye for a moment, but which in the end

fatigues it. But before the wholesome remedy of nature--the

fatigue--arrives, the hasty reader has passed on to some new

excitement, which in its turn stimulates for an instant, and then is

passed by for ever. These conditions are not favourable to the due

appreciation of pure art--of that art which must be known before it is

admired--which must have fastened irrevocably on the brain before you

appreciate it--which you must love ere it will seem worthy of your

love. Women too, whose voice in literature counts as well as that of

men--and in a light literature counts for more than that of

men--women, such as we know them, such as they are likely to be, ever

prefer a delicate unreality to a true or firm art. A dressy

literature, an exaggerated literature seem to be fated to us. These

are our curses, as other times had theirs.

And yet

Think not the living times forget,

Ages of heroes fought and fell,

That Homer in the end might tell;

O'er grovelling generations past

Upstood the Gothic fane at last;

And countless hearts in countless years

Had wasted thoughts, and hopes, and fears,

Rude laughter and unmeaning tears;

Ere England Shakespeare saw, or Rome

The pure perfection of her dome.

Others I doubt not, if not we,

The issue of our toils shall see;

And (they forgotten and unknown)

Young children gather as their own

The harvest that the dead had sown.

WALTER HORATIO PATER

1839-1894

COLERIDGE'S WRITINGS (1866)

_Conversations, Letters, and Recollections of S. T. Coleridge._ Edited

by THOMAS ALLSOP. London. 1864.

Forms of intellectual and spiritual culture often exercise their

subtlest and most artful charm when life is already passing from them.

Searching and irresistible as are the changes of the human spirit on

its way to perfection, there is yet so much elasticity of temper that

what must pass away sooner or later is not disengaged all at once even

from the highest order of minds. Nature, which by one law of

development evolves ideas, moralities, modes of inward life, and

represses them in turn, has in this way provided that the earlier

growth should propel its fibres into the later, and so transmit the

whole of its forces in an unbroken continuity of life. Then comes the

spectacle of the reserve of the elder generation exquisitely refined

by the antagonism of the new. That current of new life chastens them

as they contend against it. Weaker minds do not perceive the change;

clearer minds abandon themselves to it. To feel the change everywhere,

yet not to abandon oneself to it, is a situation of difficulty and

contention. Communicating in this way to the passing stage of culture

the charm of what is chastened, high-strung, athletic, they yet

detach the highest minds from the past by pressing home its

difficulties and finally proving it impossible. Such is the charm of

Julian, of St. Louis, perhaps of Luther; in the narrower compass of

modern times, of Dr. Newman and Lacordaire; it is also the peculiar

charm of Coleridge.

Modern thought is distinguished from ancient by its cultivation of the

'relative' spirit in place of the 'absolute'. Ancient philosophy

sought to arrest every object in an eternal outline, to fix thought in

a necessary formula, and types of life in a classification by 'kinds'

or _genera_. To the modern spirit nothing is, or can be rightly known

except relatively under conditions. An ancient philosopher indeed

started a philosophy of the relative, but only as an enigma. So the

germs of almost all philosophical ideas were enfolded in the mind of

antiquity, and fecundated one by one in after ages by the external

influences of art, religion, culture in the natural sciences,

belonging to a particular generation, which suddenly becomes

preoccupied by a formula or theory, not so much new as penetrated by a

new meaning and expressiveness. So the idea of 'the relative' has been

fecundated in modern times by the influence of the sciences of

observation. These sciences reveal types of life evanescing into each

other by inexpressible refinements of change. Things pass into their

opposites by accumulation of undefinable quantities. The growth of

those sciences consists in a continual analysis of facts of rough and

general observation into groups of facts more precise and minute. A

faculty for truth is a power of distinguishing and fixing delicate and

fugitive details. The moral world is ever in contact with the

physical; the relative spirit has invaded moral philosophy from the

ground of the inductive science. There it has started a new analysis

of the relations of body and mind, good and evil, freedom and

necessity. Hard and abstract moralities are yielding to a more exact

estimate of the subtlety and complexity of our life. Always, as an

organism increases in perfection the conditions of its life become

more complex. Man is the most complex of the products of nature.

Character merges into temperament; the nervous system refines itself

into intellect. His physical organism is played upon not only by the

physical conditions about it, but by remote laws of inheritance, the

vibrations of long past acts reaching him in the midst of the new

order of things in which he lives. When we have estimated these

conditions he is not yet simple and isolated; for the mind of the

race, the character of the age, sway him this way or that through the

medium of language and ideas. It seems as if the most opposite

statements about him were alike true; he is so receptive, all the

influences of the world and of society ceaselessly playing upon him,

so that every hour in his life is unique, changed altogether by a

stray word, or glance, or touch. The truth of these relations

experience gives us; not the truth of eternal outlines effected once

for all, but a world of fine gradations and subtly linked conditions,

shifting intricately as we ourselves change; and bids us by constant

clearing of the organs of observation and perfecting of analysis to

make what we can of these. To the intellect, to the critical spirit,

these subtleties of effect are more precious than anything else. What

is lost in precision of form is gained in intricacy of expression. To

suppose that what is called 'ontology' is what the speculative

instinct seeks, is the misconception of a backward school of

logicians. Who would change the colour or curve of a roseleaf for that

[Greek: ousia achrômatos, aschêmatistos, anaphês]. A transcendentalism

that makes what is abstract more excellent than what is concrete has

nothing akin to the leading philosophies of the world. The true

illustration of the speculative temper is not the Hindoo, lost to

sense, understanding, individuality; but such an one as Goethe, to

whom every moment of life brought its share of experimental,

individual knowledge, by whom no touch of the world of form, colour,

and passion was disregarded.

The literary life of Coleridge was a disinterested struggle against

the application of the relative spirit to moral and religious

questions. Everywhere he is restlessly scheming to apprehend the

absolute; to affirm it effectively; to get it acknowledged. Coleridge

failed in that attempt, happily even for him, for it was a struggle

against the increasing life of the mind itself. The real loss was,

that this controversial interest betrayed him into a direction which

was not for him the path of the highest intellectual success; a

direction in which his artistic talent could never find the conditions

of its perfection. Still, there is so much witchery about his poems,

that it is as a poet that he will most probably be permanently

remembered. How did his choice of a controversial interest, his

determination to affirm the absolute, weaken or modify his poetical

gift?

In 1798 he joined Wordsworth in the composition of a volume of

poems--the _Lyrical Ballads_. What Wordsworth then wrote is already

vibrant with that blithe _élan_ which carried him to final happiness

and self-possession. In Coleridge we feel already that faintness and

obscure dejection which cling like some contagious damp to all his

writings. Wordsworth was to be distinguished by a joyful and

penetrative conviction of the existence of certain latent affinities

between nature and the human mind, which reciprocally gild the mind

and nature with a kind of 'heavenly alchemy':

... My voice proclaims

How exquisitely the individual mind

(And the progressive powers perhaps no less

Of the whole species) to the external world

Is fitted:--and how exquisitely, too,

The external world is fitted to the mind:

And the creation, by no lower name

Can it be called, which they with blended might

Accomplish.[37]

[37] Preface to the _Excursion_.

In Wordsworth this took the form of an unbroken dreaming over the

aspects and transitions of nature, a reflective, but altogether

unformulated, analysis of them.

There are in Coleridge's poems expressions of this conviction as deep

as Wordsworth's. But Coleridge could never have abandoned himself to

the dream as Wordsworth did, because the first condition of such

abandonment is an unvexed quietness of heart. No one can read the

_Lines composed above Tintern_ without feeling how potent the physical

element was among the conditions of Wordsworth's genius:--'felt in the

blood and felt along the heart,'--'My whole life I have lived in

quiet thought.' The stimulus which most artists require from nature he

can renounce. He leaves the ready-made glory of the Swiss mountains to

reflect a glory on a mouldering leaf. He loves best to watch the

floating thistledown, because of its hint at an unseen life in the

air. Coleridge's temperament, [Greek: aei en sphodra orexei], with its

faintness, its grieved dejection, could never have been like that.

My genial spirits fail

And what can these avail

To lift the smothering weight from off my breast?

It were a vain endeavour,

Though I should gaze for ever

On that green light that lingers in the west:

I may not hope from outward forms to win

The passion and the life whose fountains are within.

It is that flawless temperament in Wordsworth which keeps his

conviction of a latent intelligence in nature within the limits of

sentiment or instinct, and confines it, to those delicate and subdued

shades of expression which perfect art allows. In sadder dispositions,

that is in the majority of cases, where such a conviction has existed,

it has stiffened into a formula, it has frozen into a scientific or

pseudo-scientific theory. For the perception of those affinities

brings one so near the absorbing speculative problems of

life--optimism, the proportion of man to his place in nature, his

prospects in relation to it--that it ever tends to become theory

through their contagion. Even in Goethe, who has brilliantly handled

the subject in his lyrics entitled _Gott und Welt_, it becomes

something stiffer than poetry; it is tempered by the 'pale cast' of

his technical knowledge of the nature of colours, of anatomy, of the

metamorphosis of plants.

That, however, which had only a limited power over Coleridge as

sentiment, entirely possessed him as a philosophical idea. We shall

see in what follows how deep its power was, how it pursued him

everywhere, and seemed to him to interpret every question.

Wordsworth's poetry is an optimism; it says man's relation to the

world is, and may be seen by man to be, a perfect relation; but it is

an optimism that begins and ends in an abiding instinct. Coleridge

accepts the same optimism as a philosophical idea, but an idea is

relative to an intellectual assent; sometimes it seems a better

expression of facts, sometimes a worse, as the understanding weighs it

in the logical balances. And so it is not a permanent consolation. It

is only in the rarer moments of intellectual warmth and sunlight that

it is entirely credible. In less exhilarating moments that perfect

relation of man and nature seems to shift and fail; that is, the

philosophical idea ceases to be realizable; and with Coleridge its

place is not supplied, as with Wordsworth, by the corresponding

sentiment or instinct.

What in Wordsworth is a sentiment or instinct, is in Coleridge a

philosophical idea. In other words, Coleridge's talent is a more

intellectual one than Wordsworth's, more dramatic, more

self-conscious. Wordsworth's talent, deeply reflective as it is,

because its base is an instinct, is deficient in self-knowledge.

Possessed by the rumours and voices of the haunted country, the

borders of which he has passed alone, he never thinks of withdrawing

from it to look down upon it from one of the central heights of human

life. His power absorbs him, not he it; he cannot turn it round or get

without it; he does not estimate its general relation to life. But

Coleridge, just because the essence of his talent is the intuition of

an idea, commands his talent. He not only feels with Wordsworth the

expression of mind in nature, but he can project that feeling outside

him, reduce it to a psychological law, define its relation to other

elements of culture, place it in a complete view of life.

And in some such activity as that, varied as his wide learning, in a

many-sided dramatic kind of poetry, assigning its place and value to

every mode of the inward life, seems to have been for Coleridge the

original path of artistic success. But in order to follow that path

one must hold ideas loosely in the relative spirit, not seek to

stereotype any one of the many modes of that life; one must

acknowledge that the mind is ever greater than its own products,

devote ideas to the service of art rather than of [Greek: gnôsis], not

disquiet oneself about the absolute. Perhaps Coleridge is more

interesting because he did not follow this path. Repressing his

artistic interest and voluntarily discolouring his own work, he turned

to console and strengthen the human mind, vulgarized or dejected, as

he believed, by the acquisition of new knowledge about itself in the

_éclaircissement_ of the eighteenth century.

What the reader of our own generation will least find in Coleridge's

prose writings is the excitement of the literary sense. And yet in

those grey volumes we have the production of one who made way ever by

a charm, the charm of voice, of aspect, of language, above all, by

the intellectual charm of new, moving, luminous ideas. Perhaps the

chief offence in Coleridge is an excess of seriousness, a seriousness

that arises not from any moral principle, but from a misconception of

the perfect manner. There is a certain shade of levity and unconcern,

the perfect manner of the eighteenth century, which marks complete

culture in the handling of abstract questions. The humanist, he who

possesses that complete culture, does not 'weep' over the failure of

'a theory of the quantification of the predicate', nor 'shriek' over

the fall of a philosophical formula. A kind of humour is one of the

conditions of the true mental attitude in the criticism of past stages

of thought. Humanity cannot afford to be too serious about them, any

more than a man of good sense can afford to be too serious in looking

back upon his own childhood. Plato, whom Coleridge claims as the first

of his spiritual ancestors, Plato, as we remember him, a true

humanist, with Petrarch and Goethe and M. Renan, holds his theories

lightly, glances with a blithe and naïve inconsequence from one view

to another, not anticipating the burden of meaning 'views' will one

day have for humanity. In reading him one feels how lately it was that

Croesus thought it a paradox to say that external prosperity was not

necessarily happiness. But on Coleridge lies the whole weight of the

sad reflection that has since come into the world, with which for us

the air is full, which the children in the market-place repeat to each

other. Even his language is forced and broken, lest some saving

formula should be lost--'distinctities', 'enucleation', 'pentad of

operative Christianity'--he has a whole vocabulary of such phrases,

and expects to turn the tide of human thought by fixing the sense of

such expressions as 'reason', 'understanding', 'idea'.

Again, he has not the jealousy of the true artist in excluding all

associations that have no charm or colour or gladness in them;

everywhere he allows the impress of an inferior theological

literature; he is often prolix and importunate about most indifferent

heroes--Sir Alexander Ball, Dr. Bell, even Dr. Bowyer, the coarse

pedant of the Blue-coat School. And the source of all this is closely

connected with the source of his literary activity. For Coleridge had

chosen as the mark of his literary egotism a kind of intellectual

_tour de force_--to found a religious philosophy, to do something with

the 'idea' in spite of the essential nature of the 'idea'. And

therefore all is fictitious from the beginning. He had determined,

that which is humdrum, insipid, which the human spirit has done with,

shall yet stimulate and inspire. What he produced symbolizes this

purpose--the mass of it _ennuyant_, depressing: the _Aids to

Reflection_, for instance, with Archbishop Leighton's vague pieties

all twisted into the jargon of a spiritualistic philosophy. But

sometimes 'the pulse of the God's blood' does transmute it, kindling

here and there a spot that begins to live; as in that beautiful

fragment at the end of the _Church and State_, or in the distilled and

concentrated beauty of such a passage as this:

The first range of hills, that encircles the scanty vale of

human life, is the horizon for the majority of its

inhabitants. On its ridges the common sun is born and

departs. From them the stars rise, and touching them they

vanish. By the many, even this range, the natural limit and

bulwark of the vale, is but imperfectly known. Its higher

ascents are too often hidden by mists and clouds from

uncultivated swamps, which few have courage or curiosity to

penetrate. To the multitude below these vapours appear now

as the dark haunts of terrific agents, on which none may

intrude with impunity; and now all a-glow, with colours not

their own, they are gazed at as the splendid palaces of

happiness and power. But in all ages there have been a few

who, measuring and sounding the rivers of the vale at the

feet of their furthest inaccessible falls, have learned that

the sources must be far higher and far inward; a few who,

even in the level streams, have detected elements which

neither the vale itself nor the surrounding mountains

contained or could supply.

_Biographia Literaria._

'I was driven from life in motion to life in thought and sensation.'

So Coleridge sums up his childhood with its delicacy, its

sensitiveness, and passion. From his tenth to his eighteenth year he

was at a rough school in London. Speaking of this time, he says:

When I was first plucked up and transplanted from my

birthplace and family, Providence, it has often occurred to

me, gave me the first intimation that it was my lot, and

that it was best for me, to make or find my way of life a

detached individual, a _terrae filius_, who was to ask love

or service of no one on any more specific relation than that

of being a man, and as such to take my chance for the free

charities of humanity.[38]

[38] Biographical Supplement to _Biographia Literaria_, chap.

ii.

Even his fine external nature was for years repressed, wronged, driven

inward--'at fourteen I was in a continual state of low fever.' He

becomes a dreamer, an eager student, but without ambition.

This depressed boy is nevertheless, on the spiritual side, the child

of a noble house. At twenty-five he is exercising a wonderful charm,

and has defined for himself a peculiar line of intellectual activity.

He had left Cambridge without a degree, a Unitarian. Unable to take

orders, he determined through Southey's influence to devote himself to

literature. When he left Cambridge there was a prejudice against him

which has given occasion to certain suspicions. Those who knew him

best discredit these suspicions. What is certain is that he was

subject to fits of violent, sometimes fantastic, despondency. He

retired to Stowey, in Somersetshire, to study poetry and philosophy.

In 1797 his poetical gift was in full flower; he wrote _Kubla Khan_,

the first part of _Christabel_, and _The Ancient Mariner_. His

literary success grew in spite of opposition. He had a strange

attractive gift of conversation, or rather of monologue, as De Stael

said, full of _bizarrerie_, with the rapid alternations of a dream,

and here and there a sudden summons into a world strange to the

hearer, abounding with images drawn from a sort of divided, imperfect

life, as of one to whom the external world penetrated only in part,

and, blended with all this, passages of the deepest obscurity,

precious only for their musical cadence, the echo in Coleridge of the

eloquence of the older English writers, of whom he was so ardent a

lover. All through this brilliant course we may discern the power of

the Asiatic temperament, of that voluptuousness which is perhaps

connected with his appreciation of the intimacy, the almost mystical

_rapport_, between man and nature. 'I am much better', he writes, 'and

my new and tender health is all over me like a voluptuous feeling.'

And whatever fame, or charm, or life-inspiring gift he has had is the

vibration of the interest he excited then, the propulsion into years

that clouded his early promise of that first buoyant, irresistible

self-assertion: so great is even the indirect power of a sincere

effort towards the ideal life, of even a temporary escape of the

spirit from routine. Perhaps the surest sign of his election--that he

was indeed, on the spiritual side, the child of a noble house--is that

story of the Pantisocratic scheme, which at this distance looks so

grotesque. In his enthusiasm for the French Revolution, the old

communistic dream with its appeal to nature (perhaps a little

theatrical), touched him, as it had touched Rousseau, Saint-Pierre,

and Chateaubriand. He had married one, his affection for whom seems to

have been only a passing feeling; with her and a few friends he was to

found a communistic settlement on the banks of the Susquehannah--'the

name was pretty and metrical.' It was one of Coleridge's lightest

dreams; but also one which could only have passed through the liberal

air of his earlier life. The later years of the French Revolution,

which for us have discredited all such dreams, deprived him of that

youthfulness which is the preservative element in a literary talent.

In 1798, he visited Germany. A beautiful fragment of this period

remains, describing a spring excursion to the Brocken. His excitement

still vibrates in it. Love, all joyful states of mind, are

self-expressive; they loosen the tongue, they fill the thoughts with

sensuous images, they harmonize one with the world of sight. We hear

of the 'rich graciousness and courtesy' of Coleridge's manner, of the

white and delicate skin, the abundant black hair, the full, almost

animal lips, that whole physiognomy of the dreamer already touched

with fanaticism. One says of the text of one of his Unitarian sermons,

'his voice rose like a stream of rich distilled perfumes'; another,

'he talks like an angel, and does--nothing.'

Meantime, he had designed an intellectual novelty in the shape of a

religious philosophy. Socinian theology and the philosophy of Hartley

had become distasteful. 'Whatever is against right reason, that no

faith can oblige us to believe.' Coleridge quotes these words from

Jeremy Taylor. And yet ever since the dawn of the Renaissance, had

subsisted a conflict between reason and faith. From the first, indeed,

the Christian religion had affirmed the existence of such a conflict,

and had even based its plea upon its own weakness in it. In face of

the classical culture, with its deep wide-struck roots in the world as

it permanently exists, St. Paul asserted the claims of that which

could not appeal with success to any genuinely human principle.

Paradox as it was, that was the strength of the new spirit; for how

much is there at all times in humanity which cannot appeal with

success for encouragement or tolerance to any genuinely human

principle. In the Middle Ages it might seem that faith had reconciled

itself to philosophy; the Catholic church was the leader of the

world's life as well as of the spirit's. Looking closer we see that

the conflict is still latent there; the supremacy of faith is only a

part of the worship of sorrow and weakness which marks the age. The

weak are no longer merely a majority, they are all Europe. It is not

that faith has become one with reason; but a strange winter, a strange

suspension of life, has passed over the classical culture which is

only the human reason in its most trenchant form. Glimpse after

glimpse, as that pagan culture awoke to life, the conflict was felt

once more. It is at the court of Frederick II that the Renaissance

first becomes discernible as an actual power in European society. How

definite and unmistakable is the attitude of faith towards that! Ever

since the Reformation all phases of theology had been imperfect

philosophies--that is, in which there was a religious _arrière

pensée_; philosophies which could never be in the ascendant in a

sincerely scientific sphere. The two elements had never really mixed.

Writers so different as Locke and Taylor have each his liberal

philosophy, and each has his defence of the orthodox belief; but,

also, each has a divided mind; we wonder how the two elements could

have existed side by side; brought together in a single mind, but

unable to fuse in it, they reveal their radical contrariety. The

Catholic church and humanity are two powers that divide the intellect

and spirit of man. On the Catholic side is faith, rigidly logical as

Ultramontanism, with a proportion of the facts of life, that is, all

that is despairing in life coming naturally under its formula. On the

side of humanity is all that is desirable in the world, all that is

sympathetic with its laws, and succeeds through that sympathy.

Doubtless, for the individual, there are a thousand intermediate

shades of opinion, a thousand resting-places for the religious spirit;

still, [Greek: to diorizein ouk esti tôn pollôn], fine distinctions

are not for the majority; and this makes time eventually a dogmatist,

working out the opposition in its most trenchant form, and fixing the

horns of the dilemma; until, in the present day, we have on one side

Pius IX, the true descendant of the fisherman, issuing the Encyclical,

pleading the old promise against the world with a special kind of

justice; and on the other side, the irresistible modern culture,

which, as religious men often remind us, is only Christian

accidentally.

The peculiar temper of Coleridge's intellect made the idea of

reconciling this conflict very seductive. With a true speculative

talent he united a false kind of subtlety and the full share of

vanity. A dexterous intellectual _tour de force_ has always an

independent charm; and therefore it is well for the cause of truth

that the directness, sincerity, and naturalness of things are beyond a

certain limit sacrificed in vain to a factitious interest. A method so

forced as that of Coleridge's religious philosophy is from the first

doomed to be insipid, so soon as the temporary interest or taste or

curiosity it was designed to meet has passed away. Then, as to the

manner of such books as the _Aids to Reflection_, or _The

Friend_:--These books came from one whose vocation was in the world of

art; and yet, perhaps, of all books that have been influential in

modern times, they are farthest from the classical form--bundles of

notes--the original matter inseparably mixed up with that borrowed

from others--the whole, just that mere preparation for an artistic

effect which the finished artist would be careful one day to destroy.

Here, again, we have a trait profoundly characteristic of Coleridge.

He often attempts to reduce a phase of thought, subtle and exquisite,

to conditions too rough for it. He uses a purely speculative gift in

direct moral edification. Scientific truth is something fugitive,

relative, full of fine gradations; he tries to fix it in absolute

formulas. The _Aids to Reflection_, or _The Friend_, is an effort to

propagate the volatile spirit of conversation into the less ethereal

fabric of a written book; and it is only here and there that the

poorer matter becomes vibrant, is really lifted by the spirit.

At forty-two, we find Coleridge saying in a letter:

I feel with an intensity unfathomable by words my utter

nothingness, impotence, and worthlessness in and for myself.

I have learned what a sin is against an infinite,

imperishable being such as is the soul of man. The

consolations, at least the sensible sweetness of hope, I do

not possess. On the contrary, the temptation which I have

constantly to fight up against is a fear that, if

annihilation and the possibility of heaven were offered to

my choice, I should choose the former.

What was the cause of this change? That is precisely the point on

which, after all the gossip there has been, we are still ignorant. At

times Coleridge's opium excesses were great; but what led to those

excesses must not be left out of account. From boyhood he had a

tendency to low fever, betrayed by his constant appetite for bathing

and swimming, which he indulged even when a physician had opposed it.

In 1803, he went to Malta as secretary to the English Governor. His

daughter suspects that the source of the evil was there, that for one

of his constitution the climate of Malta was deadly. At all events,

when he returned, the charm of those five wonderful years had failed

at the source.

De Quincey said of him, 'he wanted better bread than can be made with

wheat.' Lamb said of him that from boyhood he had 'hungered for

eternity'. Henceforth those are the two notes of his life. From this

time we must look for no more true literary talent in him. His style

becomes greyer and greyer, his thoughts _outré_, exaggerated, a kind

of credulity or superstition exercised upon abstract words. Like

Clifford, in Hawthorne's beautiful romance--the born Epicurean, who by

some strange wrong has passed the best of his days in a prison--he is

the victim of a division of the will, often showing itself in trivial

things: he could never choose on which side of the garden path he

would walk. In 1803, he wrote a poem on 'The Pains of Sleep'. That

unrest increased. Mr. Gillman tells us 'he had long been greatly

afflicted with nightmare, and when residing with us was frequently

aroused from this painful sleep by any one of the family who might

hear him'.

That faintness and continual dissolution had its own consumptive

refinements, and even brought, as to the 'Beautiful Soul' in _Wilhelm

Meister_, a faint religious ecstasy--that 'singing in the sails' which

is not of the breeze. Here, again, is a note of Coleridge's:

'In looking at objects of nature while I am thinking, as at

yonder moon, dim-glimmering through the window-pane, I seem

rather to be seeking, as it were asking, a symbolical

language for something within me that already and for ever

exists, than observing anything new. Even when that latter

is the case, yet still I have always an obscure feeling, as

if that new phenomenon were the dim awaking of a forgotten

or hidden truth of my inner nature.' Then, 'while I was

preparing the pen to write this remark, I lost the train of

thought which had led me to it.'

What a distemper of the eye of the mind! What an almost bodily

distemper there is in that!

Coleridge's intellectual sorrows were many; but he had one singular

intellectual happiness. With an inborn taste for transcendental

philosophy he lived just at the time when that philosophy took an

immense spring in Germany, and connected itself with a brilliant

literary movement. He had the luck to light upon it in its freshness,

and introduce it to his countrymen. What an opportunity for one reared

on the colourless English philosophies, but who feels an irresistible

attraction towards metaphysical synthesis! How rare are such occasions

of intellectual contentment! This transcendental philosophy, chiefly

as systematized by Schelling, Coleridge applies, with an eager,

unwearied subtlety, to the questions of theology and art-criticism. It

is in his theory of art-criticism that he comes nearest to true and

important principles; that is the least fugitive part of his work. Let

us take this first; here we shall most clearly apprehend his main

principle.

What, then, is the essence of this criticism? On the whole it may be

described as an attempt to reclaim the world of art as a world of

fixed laws--to show that the creative activity of genius and the

simplest act of thought are but higher and lower products of the laws

of a universal logic. Criticism, feeling its own unsuccess in dealing

with the greater works of art, has sometimes made too much of those

dark and capricious suggestions of genius which even the intellect

possessed by them is unable to track or recall. It has seemed due to

their half-sacred character to look for no link between the process by

which they were produced and the slighter processes of the mind.

Coleridge assumes that the highest phases of thought must be more, not

less, than the lower, subjects of law.

With this interest, in the _Biographia Literaria_, he refines

Schelling's 'Philosophy of Nature' into a theory of art. 'Es giebt

kein Plagiat in der Philosophie' says Heine, alluding to the charge

brought against Schelling of unacknowledged borrowing from Bruno, and

certainly that which is common to Coleridge and Schelling is of far

earlier origin than the Renaissance. Schellingism, the 'Philosophy of

Nature', is indeed a constant tradition in the history of thought; it

embodies a permanent type of the speculative temper. That mode of

conceiving nature as a mirror or reflex of the intelligence of man may

be traced up to the first beginnings of Greek speculation. There are

two ways of envisaging those aspects of nature which appear to bear

the impress of reason or intelligence. There is the deist's way, which

regards them merely as marks of design, which separates the informing

mind from nature, as the mechanist from the machine; and there is the

pantheistic way, which identifies the two, which regards nature itself

as the living energy of an intelligence of the same kind as, but

vaster than, the human. Greek philosophy, finding indications of mind

everywhere, dwelling exclusively in its observations on that which is

general or formal, on that which modern criticism regards as the

modification of things by the mind of the observer, adopts the latter,

or pantheistic way, through the influence of the previous mythological

period. Mythology begins in the early necessities of language, of

which it is a kind of accident. But at a later period its essence

changes; it becomes what it was not at its birth, the servant of a

genuine poetic interest, a kind of _vivification_ of nature. Played

upon by those accidents of language, the Greek mind becomes possessed

by the conception of nature as living, thinking, almost speaking to

the mind of man. This unfixed poetical prepossession, reduced to an

abstract form, petrified into an idea, is the conception which gives a

unity of aim to Greek philosophy. Step by step it works out the

substance of the Hegelian formula: 'Was ist, das ist vernünftig; was

vernünftig ist, das ist'--'Whatever is, is according to reason;

whatever is according to reason, that is.' A science of which that

could be the formula is still but an intellectual aspiration; the

formula of true science is different. Experience, which has gradually

saddened the earth's colour, stiffened its motions, withdrawn from it

some blithe and debonair presence, has moderated our demands upon

science. The positive method makes very little account of marks of

intelligence in nature; in its wider view of phenomena it sees that

those incidents are a minority, and may rank as happy coincidences; it

absorbs them in the simpler conception of law. But the suspicion of a

mind latent in nature, struggling for release and intercourse with the

intellect of man through true ideas, has never ceased to haunt a

certain class of minds. Started again and again in successive periods

by enthusiasts on the antique pattern, in each case the thought has

seemed paler and more evanescent amidst the growing consistency and

sharpness of outline of other and more positive forms of knowledge.

Still, wherever a speculative instinct has been united with extreme

inwardness of temperament, as in Jakob Böhme, there the old Greek

conception, like some seed floating in the air, has taken root and

sprung up anew. Coleridge, thrust inward upon himself, driven from

'life in thought and sensation' to life in thought only, feels in that

dark London school a thread of the Greek mind vibrating strangely in

him. At fifteen he is discoursing on Plotinus, and has translated the

hymns of Synesius. So in later years he reflects from Schelling the

flitting tradition. He conceives a subtle co-ordination between the

ideas of the mind and the laws of the natural world. Science is to be

attained, not by observation, analysis, generalization, but by the

evolution or recovery of those ideas from within, by a sort of [Greek:

anamnêsis], every group of observed facts remaining an enigma until

the appropriate idea is struck upon them from the mind of Newton or

Cuvier, the genius in whom sympathy with the universal reason is

entire. Next he supposes that this reason or intelligence in nature

gradually becomes reflective--self-conscious. He fancies he can track

through all the simpler orders of life fragments of an eloquent

prophecy about the human mind. He regards the whole of nature as a

development of higher forms out of the lower, through shade after

shade of systematic change. The dim stir of chemical atoms towards the

axes of a crystal form, the trance-like life of plants, the animal

troubled by strange irritabilities, are stages which anticipate

consciousness. All through that increasing stir of life this was

forming itself; each stage in its unsatisfied susceptibilities seeming

to be drawn out of its own limits by the more pronounced current of

life on its confines, the 'shadow of approaching humanity' gradually

deepening, the latent intelligence working to the surface. At this

point the law of development does not lose itself in caprice; rather

it becomes more constraining and incisive. From the lowest to the

highest acts of intelligence, there is another range of refining

shades. Gradually the mind concentrates itself, frees itself from the

limits of the particular, the individual, attains a strange power of

modifying and centralizing what it receives from without according to

an inward ideal. At last, in imaginative genius, ideas become

effective; the intelligence of nature, with all its elements connected

and justified, is clearly reflected; and the interpretation of its

latent purposes is fixed in works of art.

In this fanciful and bizarre attempt to rationalize art, to range it

under the dominion of law, there is still a gap to be filled up. What

is that common law of the mind, of which a work of art and the

slighter acts of thought are alike products? Here Coleridge weaves in

Kant's fine-spun theory of the transformation of sense into

perception. What every theory of perception has to explain is that

associative power which gathers isolated sensible qualities into the

objects of the world about us. Sense, without an associative power,

would be only a threadlike stream of colours, sounds, odours--each

struck upon one for a moment, and then withdrawn. The basis of this

association may be represented as a material one, a kind of

many-coloured 'etching' on the brain. Hartley has dexterously handled

this hypothesis. The charm of his 'theory of vibrations' is the vivid

image it presents to the fancy. How large an element in a speculative

talent is the command of these happy images! Coleridge, by a finer

effort of the same kind, a greater delicacy of fancy, detects all

sorts of slips, transitions, breaks of continuity in Hartley's

glancing cobweb. Coleridge, with Kant, regards all association as

effected by a power within, to which he gives a fanciful Greek

name.[39] In an act of perception there is the matter which sense

presents, colour, tone, feeling; but also a form or mould, such as

space, unity, causation, suggested from within. In these forms we

arrest and frame the many attributes of sense. It is like that simple

chemical phenomenon where two colourless fluids uniting reflect a full

colour. Neither matter nor form can be perceived asunder; they unite

into the many-coloured image of life. This theory has not been able to

bear a loyal induction. Even if it were true, how little it would tell

us; how it attenuates fact! There, again, the charm is all in the

clear image; the image of the artist combining a few elementary

colours, curves, sounds into a new whole. Well, this power of

association, of concentrating many elements of sense in an object of

perception, is refined and deepened into the creative acts of

imagination.

[39] Esemplastic.

We of the modern ages have become so familiarized with the greater

works of art that we are little sensitive of the act of creation in

them; they do not impress us as a new presence in the world. Only

sometimes in productions which realize immediately a profound emotion

and enforce a change in taste, such as _Werther_ or _Emile_, we are

actual witnesses of the moulding of an unforeseen type by some new

principle of association. By imagination, the distinction between

which and fancy is so thrust upon his readers, Coleridge means a

vigorous act of association, which, by simplifying and restraining

their natural expression to an artificial order, refines and perfects

the types of human passion. It represents the excitements of the

human kind, but reflected in a new manner, 'excitement itself

imitating order.' 'Originally the offspring of passion,' he somewhere

says, 'but now the adopted children of power.' So far there is nothing

new or distinctive; every one who can receive from a poem or picture a

total impression will admit so much. What makes the view distinctive

in Coleridge are the Schellingistic associations with which he colours

it, that faint glamour of the philosophy of nature which was ever

influencing his thoughts. That suggested the idea of a subtly winding

parallel, a 'rapport' in every detail, between the human mind and the

world without it, laws of nature being so many transformed ideas.

Conversely, the ideas of the human mind would be only transformed

laws. Genius would be in a literal sense an exquisitely purged

sympathy with nature. Those associative conceptions of the

imagination, those unforeseen types of passion, would come, not so

much of the artifice and invention of the understanding, as from

self-surrender to the suggestions of nature; they would be evolved by

the stir of nature itself realizing the highest reach of its latent

intelligence; they would have a kind of antecedent necessity to rise

at some time to the surface of the human mind.

It is natural that Shakespeare should be the idol of all such

criticism, whether in England or Germany. The first effect in

Shakespeare is that of capricious detail, of the waywardness that

plays with the parts careless of the impression of the whole. But

beyond there is the constraining unity of effect, the uneffaceable

impression, of _Hamlet_ or _Macbeth_. His hand moving freely is

curved round by some law of gravitation from within; that is, there is

the most constraining unity in the most abundant variety. Coleridge

exaggerates this unity into something like the unity of a natural

organism, the associative act that effected it into something closely

akin to the primitive power of nature itself. 'In the Shakespearian

drama', he says, 'there is a vitality which grows and evolves itself

from within.' Again:

He, too, worked in the spirit of nature, by evolving the

germ from within by the imaginative power according to the

idea. For as the power of seeing is to light, so is an idea

in mind to a law in nature. They are correlatives which

suppose each other.

Again:

The organic form is innate; it shapes, as it develops,

itself from within, and the fulness of its development is

one and the same with the perfection of its outward form.

Such as the life is, such is the form. Nature, the prime

genial artist, inexhaustible in diverse powers, is equally

inexhaustible in forms; each exterior is the physiognomy of

the being within, and even such is the appropriate

excellence of Shakespeare, himself a nature humanized, a

genial understanding, directing self-consciously a power and

an implicit wisdom deeper even than our consciousness.

There 'the absolute' has been affirmed in the sphere of art; and

thought begins to congeal. Coleridge has not only overstrained the

elasticity of his hypothesis, but has also obscured the true interest

of art. For, after all, the artist has become something almost

mechanical; instead of being the most luminous and self-possessed

phase of consciousness, the associative act itself looks like some

organic process of assimilation. The work of art is sometimes likened

to the living organism. That expresses the impression of a

self-delighting, independent life which a finished work of art gives

us; it does not express the process by which that work was produced.

Here there is no blind ferment of lifeless elements to realize a type.

By exquisite analysis the artist attains clearness of idea, then, by

many stages of refining, clearness of expression. He moves slowly over

his work, calculating the tenderest tone, and restraining the subtlest

curve, never letting his hand or fancy move at large, gradually

refining flaccid spaces to the higher degree of expressiveness.

Culture, at least, values even in transcendent works of art the power

of the understanding in them, their logical process of construction,

the spectacle of supreme intellectual dexterity which they afford.

Coleridge's criticism may well be remembered as part of the long

pleading of German culture for the things 'behind the veil'. It

recalls us from the work of art to the mind of the artist; and, after

all, this is what is infinitely precious, and the work of art only as

the index of it. Still, that is only the narrower side of a complete

criticism. Perhaps it is true, as some one says in Lessing's _Emilie

Galotti_, that, if Michael Angelo had been born without hands, he

would still have been the greatest of artists. But we must admit the

truth also of an opposite view: 'In morals as in art', says M. Renan,

'the word is nothing--the fact is everything. The idea which lurks

under a picture of Raphael is a slight matter; it is the picture

itself only that counts.'

What constitutes an artistic gift is, first of all, a natural

susceptibility to moments of strange excitement, in which the colours

freshen upon our thread bare world, and the routine of things about

us is broken by a novel and happier synthesis. These are moments into

which other minds may be made to enter, but which they cannot

originate. This susceptibility is the element of genius in an artistic

gift. Secondly, there is what may be called the talent of projection,

of throwing these happy moments into an external concrete form--a

statue, or play, or picture. That projection is of all degrees of

completeness; its facility and transparence are modified by the

circumstances of the individual, his culture, and his age. When it is

perfectly transparent, the work is classical. Compare the power of

projection in Mr. Browning's _Sordello_, with that power in the

_Sorrows of Werther_. These two elements determine the two chief aims

of criticism. First, it has to classify those initiative moments

according to the amount of interest excited in them, to estimate their

comparative acceptability, their comparative power of giving joy to

those who undergo them. Secondly, it has to test, by a study of the

artistic product itself, in connexion with the intellectual and

spiritual condition of its age, the completeness of the projection.

These two aims form the positive, or concrete, side of criticism;

their direction is not towards a metaphysical definition of the

universal element in an artistic effort, but towards a subtle

gradation of the shades of difference between one artistic gift and

another. This side of criticism is infinitely varied; and it is what

French culture more often achieves than the German.

Coleridge has not achieved this side in an equal degree with the

other; and this want is not supplied by the _Literary Remains_, which

contain his studies on Shakespeare. There we have a repetition, not

an application, of the absolute formula. Coleridge is like one who

sees in a picture only the rules of perspective, and is always trying

to simplify even those. Thus: 'Where there is no humour, but only wit,

or the like, there is no growth from within.' 'What is beauty'? he

asks. 'It is the unity of the manifold, the coalescence of the

diverse.' So of Dante: 'There is a total impression of infinity; the

wholeness is not in vision or conception, but in an inner feeling of

totality and absolute being.' Again, of the _Paradise Lost_: 'It has

the totality of the poem as distinguished from the _ab ovo_ birth and

parentage or straight line of history.'

That exaggerated inwardness is barren. Here, too, Coleridge's thoughts

require to be thawed, to be set in motion. He is admirable in the

detection, the analysis, and statement of a few of the highest general

laws of art-production. But he withdraws us too far from what we can

see, hear, and feel. Doubtless, the idea, the intellectual element, is

the spirit and life of art. Still, art is the triumph of the senses

and the emotions; and the senses and the emotions must not be cheated

of their triumph after all. That strange and beautiful psychology

which he employs, with its evanescent delicacies, has not sufficient

corporeity. Again, one feels that the discussion about Hartley,

meeting us in the way, throws a tone of insecurity over the critical

theory which it introduces. Its only effect is to win for the terms in

which that criticism is expressed, the associations of one side in a

metaphysical controversy.

The vagueness and fluidity of Coleridge's theological opinions have

been exaggerated through an illusion, which has arisen from the

occasional form in which they have reached us. Criticism, then, has to

methodize and focus them. They may be arranged under three heads; the

general principles of supernaturalism, orthodox dogmas, the

interpretation of Scripture. With regard to the first and second,

Coleridge ranks as a Conservative thinker; but his principles of

Scriptural interpretation resemble Lessing's; they entitle him to be

regarded as the founder of the modern liberal school of English

theology. By supernaturalism is meant the theory of a divine person in

immediate communication with the human mind, dealing with it out of

that order of nature which includes man's body and his ordinary trains

of thought, according to fixed laws, which the theologian sums up in

the doctrines of 'grace' and 'sin'. Of this supernaturalism, the _Aids

to Reflection_ attempts to give a metaphysical proof. The first

necessity of the argument is to prove that religion, with its supposed

experiences of grace and sin, and the realities of a world above the

world of sense, is the fulfilment of the constitution of every man,

or, in the language of the 'philosophy of nature', is part of the

'idea' of man; so that, when those experiences are absent, all the

rest of his nature is unexplained, like some enigmatical fragment, the

construction and working of which we cannot surmise. According to

Schelling's principle, the explanation of every phase of life is to be

sought in that next above it. This axiom is applied to three supposed

stages of man's reflective life: Prudence, Morality, Religion.

Prudence, by which Coleridge means something like Bentham's

'enlightened principle of self-preservation', is, he says, an

inexplicable instinct, a blind motion in the dark, until it is

expanded into morality. Morality, again, is but a groundless

prepossession until transformed into a religious recognition of a

spiritual world, until, as Coleridge says in his rich figurative

language, 'like the main feeder into some majestic lake, rich with

hidden springs of its own, it flows into, and becomes one with, the

spiritual life.' A spiritual life, then, being the fulfilment of human

nature, implied, if we see clearly, in those instincts which enable

one to live on from day to day, is part of the 'idea' of man.

The second necessity of the argument is to prove that 'the idea',

according to the principle of the 'philosophy of nature', is an

infallible index of the actual condition of the world without us. Here

Coleridge introduces an analogy:

In the world, we see everywhere evidences of a unity, which

the component parts are so far from explaining, that they

necessarily presuppose it as the cause and condition of

their existing as those parts, or even of their existing at

all. This antecedent unity, or cause and principle of each

union, it has, since the time of Bacon and Kepler, been

customary to call a law. This crocus for instance; or any

other flower the reader may have before his sight, or choose

to bring before his fancy; that the root, stem, leaves,

petals, &c., cohere to one plant is owing to an antecedent

power or principle in the seed which existed before a single

particle of the matters that constitute the size and

visibility of the crocus had been attracted from the

surrounding soil, air, and moisture. Shall we turn to the

seed? there, too, the same necessity meets us: an antecedent

unity must here, too, be supposed. Analyse the seeds with

the finest tools, and let the solar microscope come in aid

of your senses, what do you find?--means and instruments; a

wondrous fairy tale of nature, magazines of food, stores of

various sorts, pipes, spiracles, defences; a house of many

chambers, and the owner and inhabitant invisible.

_Aids to Reflection._

Nature, that is, works by what we may call 'intact ideas'. It

co-ordinates every part of the crocus to all the other parts; one

stage of its growth to the whole process; and having framed its

organism to assimilate certain external elements, it does not cheat it

of those elements, soil, air, moisture. Well, if the 'idea' of man is

to be intact, he must be enveloped in a supernatural world; and nature

always works by intact ideas. The spiritual life is the highest

development of the idea of man; there must be a supernatural world

corresponding to it.

One finds, it is hard to say how many, difficulties in drawing

Coleridge's conclusion. To mention only one of them--the argument

looks too like the exploded doctrine of final causes. Of course the

crocus would not live unless the conditions of its life were supplied.

The flower is made for soil, air, moisture, and it has them; just as

man's senses are made for a sensible world, and we have the sensible

world. But give the flower the power of dreaming, nourish it on its

own reveries, put man's wild hunger of heart and susceptibility to

_ennui_ in it, and what indication of the laws of the world without

it, would be afforded by its longing to break its bonds?

In theology people are content with analogies, probabilities, with the

empty schemes of arguments for which the data are still lacking;

arguments, the rejection of which Coleridge tells us implies 'an evil

heart of unbelief', but of which we might as truly say that they

derive all their consistency from the peculiar atmosphere of the mind

which receives them. Such arguments are received in theology because

what chains men to a religion is not its claim on their reason, their

hopes or fears, but the glow it affords to the world, its 'beau

ideal'. Coleridge thinks that if we reject the supernatural, the

spiritual element in life will evaporate also, that we shall have to

accept a life with narrow horizons, without disinterestedness, harshly

cut off from the springs of life in the past. But what is this

spiritual element? It is the passion for inward perfection, with its

sorrows, its aspirations, its joy. These mental states are the

delicacies of the higher morality of the few, of Augustine, of the

author of the 'Imitation', of Francis de Sales; in their essence they

are only the permanent characteristics of the higher life. Augustine,

or the author of the 'Imitation', agreeably to the culture of their

age, had expressed them in the terms of a metaphysical theory, and

expanded them into what theologians call the doctrines of grace and

sin, the fluctuations of the union of the soul with its unseen friend.

The life of those who are capable of a passion for perfection still

produces the same mental states; but that religious expression of them

is no longer congruous with the culture of the age. Still, all inward

life works itself out in a few simple forms, and culture cannot go

very far before the religious graces reappear in it in a subtilized

intellectual shape. There are aspects of the religious character which

have an artistic worth distinct from their religious import. Longing,

a chastened temper, spiritual joy, are precious states of mind, not

because they are part of man's duty or because God has commanded them,

still less because they are means of obtaining a reward, but because

like culture itself they are remote, refined, intense, existing only

by the triumph of a few over a dead world of routine in which there

is no lifting of the soul at all. If there is no other world, art in

its own interest must cherish such characteristics as beautiful

spectacles. Stephen's face, 'like the face of an angel,' has a worth

of its own, even if the opened heaven is but a dream.

Our culture, then, is not supreme, our intellectual life is

incomplete, we fail of the intellectual throne, if we have no inward

longing, inward chastening, inward joy. Religious belief, the craving

for objects of belief, may be refined out of our hearts, but they must

leave their sacred perfume, their spiritual sweetness behind. This law

of the highest intellectual life has sometimes seemed hard to

understand. Those who maintain the claims of the older and narrower

forms of religious life against the claims of culture are often

embarrassed at finding the intellectual life heated through with the

very graces to which they would sacrifice it. How often in the higher

class of theological writings--writings which really spring from an

original religious genius, such as those of Dr. Newman--does the

modern aspirant to perfect culture seem to find the expression of the

inmost delicacies of his own life, the same yet different! The

spiritualities of the Christian life have often drawn men on, little

by little, into the broader spiritualities of systems opposed to

it--pantheism, or positivism, or a philosophy of indifference. Many in

our own generation, through religion, have become dead to religion.

How often do we have to look for some feature of the ancient religious

life, not in a modern saint, but in a modern artist or philosopher!

For those who have passed out of Christianity, perhaps its most

precious souvenir is the ideal of a transcendental disinterestedness.

Where shall we look for this ideal? In Spinoza; or perhaps in Bentham

or in Austin.

Some of those who have wished to save supernaturalism--as, for

instance, Theodore Parker--have rejected more or less entirely the

dogmas of the Church. Coleridge's instinct is truer than theirs; the

two classes of principles are logically connected. It was in defence

of the dogmas of the Church that Coleridge elaborated his unhappy

crotchet of the diversity of the reason from the understanding. The

weakness of these dogmas had ever been, not so much a failure of the

authority of Scripture or tradition in their favour, as their conflict

with the reason that they were words rather than conceptions. That

analysis of words and conceptions which in modern philosophy has been

a principle of continual rejuvenescence with Descartes and Berkeley,

as well as with Bacon and Locke, had desolated the field of scholastic

theology. It is the rationality of the dogmas of that theology that

Coleridge had a taste for proving.

Of course they conflicted with the understanding, with the common

daylight of the mind, but then might there not be some mental faculty

higher than the understanding? The history of philosophy supplied many

authorities for this opinion. Then, according to the 'philosophy of

nature', science and art are both grounded upon the 'ideas' of genius,

which are a kind of intuition, which are their own evidence. Again,

this philosophy was always saying the ideas of the mind must be true,

must correspond to reality; and what an aid to faith is that, if one

is not too nice in distinguishing between ideas and mere convictions,

or prejudices, or habitual views, or safe opinions! Kant also had

made a distinction between the reason and the understanding. True,

this harsh division of mental faculties is exactly what is most

sterile in Kant, the essential tendency of the German school of

thought being to show that the mind always acts _en masse_. Kant had

defined two senses of reason as opposed to the understanding. First,

there was the 'speculative reason', with its 'three categories of

totality', God, the soul, and the universe--three mental forms which

might give a sort of unity to science, but to which no actual

intuition corresponded. The tendency of this part of Kant's critique

is to destroy the rational groundwork of theism. Then there was the

'practical reason', on the relation of which to the 'speculative', we

may listen to Heinrich Heine:

'After the tragedy comes the farce. [The tragedy is Kant's

destructive criticism of the speculative reason.] So far

Immanuel Kant has been playing the relentless philosopher;

he has laid siege to heaven.' Heine goes on with some

violence to describe the havoc Kant has made of the orthodox

belief: 'Old Lampe,[40] with the umbrella under his arm,

stands looking on much disturbed, perspiration and tears of

sorrow running down his cheeks. Then Immanuel Kant grows

pitiful, and shows that he is not only a great philosopher

but also a good man. He considers a little; and then, half

in good nature, half in irony, he says, "Old Lampe must have

a god, otherwise the poor man will not be happy; but man

ought to be happy in this life, the practical reason says

that; let the practical reason stand surety for the

existence of a god; it is all the same to me." Following

this argument, Kant distinguishes between the theoretical

and the practical reason, and, with the practical reason for

a magic wand, he brings to life the dead body of deism,

which the theoretical reason had slain.'

[40] The servant who attended Kant in his walks.

Coleridge first confused the speculative reason with the practical,

and then exaggerated the variety and the sphere of their combined

functions. Then he has given no consistent definition of the reason.

It is 'the power of universal and necessary convictions'; it is 'the

knowledge of the laws of the whole considered as one'; it is 'the

science of all as a whole'. Again, the understanding is 'the faculty

judging according to sense', or 'the faculty of means to mediate

ends'; and so on. The conception floating in his mind seems to have

been a really valuable one; that, namely, of a distinction between an

organ of adequate and an organ of inadequate ideas. But when we find

him casting about for a definition, not precisely determining the

functions of the reason, making long preparations for the 'deduction'

of the faculty, as in the third column of _The Friend_, but never

actually starting, we suspect that the reason is a discovery in

psychology which Coleridge has a good will to make, and that is all;

that he has got no farther than the old vague desire to escape from

the limitations of thought by some extraordinary mystical faculty.

Some of the clergy eagerly welcomed the supposed discovery. In their

difficulties they had often appealed in the old simple way to

sentiment and emotion as of higher authority than the understanding,

and on the whole had had to get on with very little philosophy. Like

M. Jourdain, they were amazed to find that they had been all the time

appealing to the reason; now they might actually go out to meet the

enemy. Orthodoxy might be cured by a hair of the dog that had bitten

it.

Theology is a great house, scored all over with hieroglyphics by

perished hands. When we decipher one of these hieroglyphics, we find

in it the statement of a mistaken opinion; but knowledge has crept

onward since the hand dropped from the wall; we no longer entertain

the opinion, and we can trace the origin of the mistake. Dogmas are

precious as memorials of a class of sincere and beautiful spirits, who

in a past age of humanity struggled with many tears, if not for true

knowledge, yet for a noble and elevated happiness. That struggle is

the substance, the dogma only its shadowy expression; received

traditionally in an altered age, it is the shadow of a shadow, a mere

[Greek: triton eidôlon], twice removed from substance and reality. The

true method then in the treatment of dogmatic theology must be

historical. Englishmen are gradually finding out how much that method

has done since the beginning of modern criticism by the hands of such

writers as Baur. Coleridge had many of the elements of this method:

learning, inwardness, a subtle psychology, a dramatic power of

sympathy with modes of thought other than his own. Often in carrying

out his own method he gives the true historical origin of a dogma,

but, with a strange dullness of the historical sense, he regards this

as a reason for the existence of the dogma now, not merely as reason

for its having existed in the past. Those historical elements he could

not envisage in the historical method, because this method is only one

of the applications, the most fruitful of them all, of the relative

spirit.

After Coleridge's death, seven letters of his on the inspiration of

Scripture were published, under the title of _Confessions of an

Inquiring Spirit_. This little book has done more than any other of

Coleridge's writings to discredit his name with the orthodox. The

frequent occurrence in it of the word 'bibliolatry', borrowed from

Lessing, would sufficiently account for this pious hatred. From

bibliolatry Coleridge was saved by the spiritualism, which, in

questions less simple than that of the infallibility of Scripture, was

so retarding to his culture. Bibliolators may remember that one who

committed a kind of intellectual suicide by catching at any appearance

of a fixed and absolute authority, never dreamed of resting on the

authority of a book. His Schellingistic notion of the possibility of

absolute knowledge, of knowing God, of a light within every man which

might discover to him the doctrines of Christianity, tended to

depreciate historical testimony, perhaps historical realism

altogether. Scripture is a legitimate sphere for the understanding. He

says, indeed, that there is more in the Bible that 'finds' him than he

has experienced in all other books put together. But still, 'There is

a Light higher than all, even the Word that was in the beginning. If

between this Word and the written letter I shall anywhere seem to

myself to find a discrepance, I will not conclude that such there

actually is; nor on the other hand will I fall under the condemnation

of them that would lie for God, but seek as I may, be thankful for

what I have--and wait.' Coleridge is the inaugurator of that _via

media_ of Scriptural criticism which makes much of saving the word

'inspiration', while it attenuates its meaning; which supposes a sort

of modified inspiration residing in the whole, not in the several

parts. 'The Scriptures were not dictated by an infallible

intelligence;' nor 'the writers each and all divinely informed as

well as inspired'. 'They refer to other documents, and in all points

express themselves as sober-minded and veracious writers under

ordinary circumstances are known to do.' To make the Bible itself 'the

subject of a special article of faith, is an unnecessary and useless

abstraction'.

His judgement on the popular view of inspiration is severe. It is

borrowed from the Cabbalists; it 'petrifies at once the whole body of

Holy Writ, with all its harmonies and symmetrical gradations;--turns

it at once into a colossal Memnon's head, a hollow passage for a

voice, a voice that mocks the voices of many men, and speaks in their

names, and yet is but one voice and the same;--and no man uttered it

and never in a human heart was it conceived'. He presses very hard on

the tricks of the 'routiniers of desk and pulpit'; forced and

fantastic interpretations; 'the strange--in all other writings

unexampled--practice of bringing together into logical dependency

detached sentences from books composed at the distance of centuries,

nay, sometimes a millennium, from each other, under different

dispensations, and for different objects.'

Certainly he is much farther from bibliolatry than from the perfect

freedom of the humanist interpreters. Still he has not freed himself

from the notion of a sacred canon; he cannot regard the books of

Scripture simply as fruits of the human spirit; his criticism is not

entirely disinterested. The difficulties he finds are chiefly the

supposed immoralities of Scripture; just those difficulties which fade

away before the modern or relative spirit, which in the moral world,

as in the physical traces everywhere change, growth, development. Of

historical difficulties, of those deeper moral difficulties which

arise, for instance, from a consideration of the constitutional

unveracity of the Oriental mind, he has no suspicion. He thinks that

no book of the New Testament was composed so late as A.D. 120.

Coleridge's undeveloped opinions would be hardly worth stating except

for the warning they afford against retarding compromises. In reading

these letters one never doubts what Coleridge tells us of himself:

'that he loved truth with an indescribable awe,' or, as he beautifully

says, 'that he would creep towards the light, even if the light had

made its way through a rent in the wall of the temple.' And yet there

is something sad in reading them by the light which twenty-five years

have thrown back upon them. Taken as a whole, they contain a fallacy

which a very ardent lover of truth might have detected.

The Bible is not to judge the spirit, but the spirit the Bible. The

Bible is to be treated as a literary product. Well, but that is a

conditional, not an absolute principle--that is not, if we regard it

sincerely, a delivery of judgement, but only a suspension of it. If we

are true to the spirit of that, we must wait patiently the complete

result of modern criticism. Coleridge states that the authority of

Scripture is on its trial--that at present it is not known to be an

absolute resting-place; and then, instead of leaving that to aid in

the formation of a fearless spirit, the spirit which, for instance,

would accept the results of M. Renan's investigations, he turns it

into a false security by anticipating the judgement of an undeveloped

criticism. Twenty-five years of that criticism have gone by, and have

hardly verified the anticipation.

The man of science asks, Are absolute principles attainable? What are

the limits of knowledge? The answer he receives from science itself is

not ambiguous. What the moralist asks is, Shall we gain or lose by

surrendering human life to the relative spirit? Experience answers,

that the dominant tendency of life is to turn ascertained truth into a

dead letter--to make us all the phlegmatic servants of routine. The

relative spirit, by dwelling constantly on the more fugitive

conditions or circumstances of things, breaking through a thousand

rough and brutal classifications, and giving elasticity to inflexible

principles, begets an intellectual finesse, of which the ethical

result is a delicate and tender justness in the criticism of human

life. Who would gain more than Coleridge by criticism in such a

spirit? We know how his life has appeared when judged by absolute

standards. We see him trying to apprehend the absolute, to stereotype

one form of faith, to attain, as he says, 'fixed principles' in

politics, morals, and religion; to fix one mode of life as the essence

of life, refusing to see the parts as parts only; and all the time his

own pathetic history pleads for a more elastic moral philosophy than

his, and cries out against every formula less living and flexible than

life itself.

'From his childhood he hungered for eternity.' After all, that is the

incontestable claim of Coleridge. The perfect flower of any elementary

type of life must always be precious to humanity, and Coleridge is the

perfect flower of the romantic type. More than Childe Harold, more

than Werther, more than René, Coleridge, by what he did, what he was,

and what he failed to do, represents that inexhaustible discontent,

languor, and home-sickness, the chords of which ring all through our

modern literature. Criticism may still discuss the claims of classical

and romantic art, or literature, or sentiment; and perhaps one day we

may come to forget the horizon, with full knowledge to be content with

what is here and now; and that is the essence of classical feeling.

But by us of the present moment, by us for whom the Greek spirit, with

its engaging naturalness, simple, chastened, debonair, [Greek:

tryphês, habrotêtos, chlidês, charitôn, himerou pothou patêr], is

itself the Sangraal of an endless pilgrimage, Coleridge, with his

passion for the absolute, for something fixed where all is moving, his

faintness, his broken memory, his intellectual disquiet, may still be

ranked among the interpreters of one of the constituent elements of

our life.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

1803-1882

SHAKESPEARE; OR, THE POET. 1850.

Great men are more distinguished by range and extent than by

originality. If we require the originality which consists in weaving,

like a spider, their web from their own bowels; in finding clay, and

making bricks, and building the house; no great men are original. Nor

does valuable originality consist in unlikeness to other men. The hero

is in the press of knights, and the thick of events; and, seeing what

men want, and sharing their desire, he adds the needful length of

sight and of arm, to come at the desired point. The greatest genius is

the most indebted man. A poet is no rattlebrain, saying what comes

uppermost, and, because he says everything, saying, at last, something

good; but a heart in unison with his time and country. There is

nothing whimsical and fantastic in his production, but sweet and sad

earnest, freighted with the weightiest convictions, and pointed with

the most determined aim which any man or class knows of in his times.

The Genius of our life is jealous of individuals, and will not have

any individual great, except through the general. There is no choice

to genius. A great man does not wake up on some fine morning, and say,

'I am full of life, I will go to sea, and find an Antarctic continent:

to-day I will square the circle: I will ransack botany, and find a

new food for man: I have a new architecture in my mind: I foresee a

new mechanic power:' no, but he finds himself in the river of the

thoughts and events, forced onward by the ideas and necessities of his

contemporaries. He stands where all the eyes of men look one way, and

their hands all point in the direction in which he should go. The

church has reared him amidst rites and pomps, and he carries out the

advice which her music gave him, and builds a cathedral needed by her

chants and processions. He finds a war raging: it educates him, by

trumpet, in barracks, and he betters the instruction. He finds two

counties groping to bring coal, or flour, or fish, from the place of

production to the place of consumption, and he hits on a railroad.

Every master has found his material collected, and his power lay in

his sympathy with his people, and in his love of the materials he

wrought in. What an economy of power! and what a compensation for the

shortness of life! All is done to his hand. The world has brought him

thus far on his way. The human race has gone out before him, sunk the

hills, filled the hollows, and bridged the rivers. Men, nations,

poets, artisans, women, all have worked for him, and he enters into

their labours. Choose any other thing, out of the line of tendency,

out of the national feeling and history, and he would have all to do

for himself; his powers would be expended in the first preparations.

Great genial power, one would almost say, consists in not being

original at all; in being altogether receptive; in letting the world

do all, and suffering the spirit of the hour to pass unobstructed

through the mind.

Shakespeare's youth fell in a time when the English people were

importunate for dramatic entertainments. The court took offence easily

at political allusions, and attempted to suppress them. The Puritans,

a growing and energetic party, and the religious among the Anglican

church, would suppress them. But the people wanted them. Inn-yards,

houses without roofs, and extemporaneous enclosures at country fairs,

were the ready theatres of strolling players. The people had tasted

this new joy; and, as we could not hope to suppress newspapers

now,--no, not by the strongest party,--neither then could king,

prelate, or puritan, alone or united, suppress an organ, which was

ballad, epic, newspaper, caucus, lecture, punch, and library, at the

same time. Probably king, prelate, and puritan, all found their own

account in it. It had become, by all causes, a national interest,--by

no means conspicuous, so that some great scholar would have thought of

treating it in an English history,--but not a whit less considerable,

because it was cheap, and of no account, like a baker's shop. The best

proof of its vitality is the crowd of writers which suddenly broke

into this field: Kyd, Marlowe, Greene, Jonson, Chapman, Dekker,

Webster, Heywood, Middleton, Peele, Ford, Massinger, Beaumont, and

Fletcher.

The secure possession, by the stage, of the public mind, is of the

first importance to the poet who works for it. He loses no time in

idle experiments. Here is audience and expectation prepared. In the

case of Shakespeare, there is much more. At the time when he left

Stratford, and went up to London, a great body of stage-plays, of all

dates and writers, existed in manuscript, and were in turn produced

on the boards. Here is the Tale of Troy, which the audience will bear

hearing some part of every week; the Death of Julius Cæsar, and other

stories out of Plutarch, which they never tire of; a shelf full of

English history, from the chronicles of Brut and Arthur, down to the

royal Henries, which men hear eagerly; and a string of doleful

tragedies, merry Italian tales, and Spanish voyages, which all the

London prentices know. All the mass has been treated, with more or

less skill, by every playwright, and the prompter has the soiled and

tattered manuscripts. It is now no longer possible to say who wrote

them first. They have been the property of the Theatre so long, and so

many rising geniuses have enlarged or altered them, inserting a

speech, or a whole Scene, or adding a song, that no man can any longer

claim copyright in this work of numbers. Happily, no man wishes to.

They are not yet desired in that way. We have few readers, many

spectators and hearers. They had best lie where they are.

Shakespeare, in common with his comrades, esteemed the mass of old

plays, waste stock, in which any experiment could be freely tried. Had

the _prestige_ which hedges about a modern tragedy existed, nothing

could have been done. The rude warm blood of the living England

circulated in the play, as in street-ballads, and gave body which he

wanted to his airy and majestic fancy. The poet needs a ground in

popular tradition on which he may work, and which, again, may restrain

his art within the due temperance. It holds him to the people,

supplies a foundation for his edifice; and, in furnishing so much

work done to his hand, leaves him at leisure, and in full strength for

the audacities of his imagination. In short, the poet owes to his

legend what sculpture owed to the temple. Sculpture in Egypt, and in

Greece, grew up in subordination to architecture. It was the ornament

of the temple wall: at first, a rude relief carved on pediments, then

the relief became bolder, and a head or arm was projected from the

wall, the groups being still arranged with reference to the building,

which serves also as a frame to hold the figures; and when, at last,

the greatest freedom of style and treatment was reached, the

prevailing genius of architecture still enforced a certain calmness

and continence in the statue. As soon as the statue was begun for

itself, and with no reference to the temple or palace, the art began

to decline; freak, extravagance, and exhibition, took the place of the

old temperance. This balance-wheel, which the sculptor found in

architecture, the perilous irritability of poetic talent found in the

accumulated dramatic materials to which the people were already

wonted, and which had a certain excellence which no single genius,

however extraordinary, could hope to create.

In point of fact, it appears that Shakespeare did owe debts in all

directions, and was able to use whatever he found; and the amount of

indebtedness may be inferred from Malone's laborious computations in

regard to the First, Second, and Third parts of _Henry VI_, in which,

'out of 6043 lines, 1771 were written by some author preceding

Shakespeare; 2373 by him, on the foundation laid by his predecessors;

and 1899 were entirely his own.' And the proceeding investigation

hardly leaves a single drama of his absolute invention. Malone's

sentence is an important piece of external history. In _Henry VIII_, I

think I see plainly the cropping out of the original rock on which his

own finer stratum was laid. The first play was written by a superior,

thoughtful man, with a vicious ear. I can mark his lines, and know

well their cadence. See Wolsey's soliloquy, and the following scene

with Cromwell, where,--instead of the metre of Shakespeare, whose

secret is, that the thought constructs the tune, so that reading for

the sense will best bring out the rhythm,--here the lines are

constructed on a given tune, and the verse has even a trace of pulpit

eloquence. But the play contains, through all its length, unmistakable

traits of Shakespeare's hand, and some passages, as the account of the

coronation, are like autographs. What is odd, the compliment to Queen

Elizabeth is in the bad rhythm.

Shakespeare knew that tradition supplies a better fable than any

invention can. If he lost any credit of design, he augmented his

resources; and, at that day, our petulant demand for originality was

not so much pressed. There was no literature for the million. The

universal reading, the cheap press, were unknown. A great poet, who

appears in illiterate times, absorbs into his sphere all the light

which is anywhere radiating. Every intellectual jewel, every flower of

sentiment, it is his fine office to bring to his people; and he comes

to value his memory equally with his invention. He is therefore little

solicitous whence his thoughts have been derived; whether through

translation, whether through tradition, whether by travel in distant

countries, whether by inspiration; from whatever source, they are

equally welcome to his uncritical audience. Nay, he borrows very near

home. Other men say wise things as well as he; only they say a good

many foolish things, and do not know when they have spoken wisely. He

knows the sparkle of the true stone, and puts it in high place,

wherever he finds it. Such is the happy position of Homer, perhaps; of

Chaucer, of Saadi. They felt that all wit was their wit. And they are

librarians and historiographers, as well as poets. Each romancer was

heir and dispenser of all the hundred tales of the world,--

Presenting Thebes' and Pelops' line,

And the tale of Troy divine.

The influence of Chaucer is conspicuous in all our early literature;

and, more recently, not only Pope and Dryden have been beholden to

him, but, in the whole society of English writers, a large

unacknowledged debt is easily traced. One is charmed with the opulence

which feeds so many pensioners. But Chaucer is a huge borrower.

Chaucer, it seems, drew continually, through Lydgate and Caxton, from

Guido di Colonna, whose Latin romance of the Trojan war was in turn a

compilation from Dares Phrygius, Ovid, and Statius. Then Petrarch,

Boccaccio, and the Provençal poets are his benefactors: the _Romaunt

of the Rose_ is only judicious translation from William of Lorris and

John of Meun: _Troilus and Creseide_, from Lollius of Urbino: _The

Cock and the Fox_, from the _Lais_ of Marie: _The House of Fame_, from

the French or Italian: and poor Gower he uses as if he were only a

brick-kiln or stone-quarry, out of which to build his house. He

steals by this apology; that what he takes has no worth where he finds

it, and the greatest where he leaves it. It has come to be practically

a sort of rule in literature, that a man, having once shown himself

capable of original writing, is entitled thenceforth to steal from the

writings of others at discretion. Thought is the property of him who

can entertain it; and of him who can adequately place it. A certain

awkwardness marks the use of borrowed thoughts; but, as soon as we

have learned what to do with them, they become our own.