do the least; for surveying themselves from the highest point of view,
amidst the infinite variety of the universe, their own share in it seems
trifling, and scarce worth a thought, and they prefer the contemplation
of all that is, or has been, or can be, to the making a coil about doing
what, when done, is no better than vanity. It is hard to concentrate
all our attention and efforts on one pursuit, except from ignorance
of others; and without this concentration of our faculties, no great
progress can be made in any one thing. It is not merely that the mind is
not capable of the effort; it does not think the effort worth making.
Action is one; but thought is manifold. He whose restless eye glances
through the wide compass of nature and art, will not consent to have
"his own nothings monstered:" but he must do this, before he can give
his whole soul to them. The mind, after "letting contemplation have its
fill," or
"Sailing with supreme dominion
Through the azure deep of air,"
sinks down on the ground, breathless, exhausted, powerless, inactive;
or if it must have some vent to its feelings, seeks the most easy and
obvious; is soothed by friendly flattery, lulled by the murmur of
immediate applause, thinks as it were aloud, and babbles in its dreams!
A scholar (so to speak) is a more disinterested and abstracted character
than a mere author. The first looks at the numberless volumes of a
library, and says, "All these are mine:" the other points to a single
volume (perhaps it may be an immortal one) and says, "My name is written
on the back of it." This is a puny and groveling ambition, beneath the
lofty amplitude of Mr. Coleridge's mind. No, he revolves in his wayward
soul, or utters to the passing wind, or discourses to his own shadow,
things mightier and more various!--Let us draw the curtain, and unlock
the shrine. Learning rocked him in his cradle, and, while yet a child,
"He lisped in numbers, for the numbers came."
At sixteen he wrote his _Ode on Chatterton_, and he still reverts to
that period with delight, not so much as it relates to himself (for that
string of his own early promise of fame rather jars than otherwise) but
as exemplifying the youth of a poet. Mr. Coleridge talks of himself,
without being an egotist, for in him the individual is always merged in
the abstract and general. He distinguished himself at school and at the
University by his knowledge of the classics, and gained several prizes
for Greek epigrams. How many men are there (great scholars, celebrated
names in literature) who having done the same thing in their youth, have
no other idea all the rest of their lives but of this achievement, of
a fellowship and dinner, and who, installed in academic honours, would
look down on our author as a mere strolling bard! At Christ's
Hospital, where he was brought up, he was the idol of those among his
schoolfellows, who mingled with their bookish studies the music of
thought and of humanity; and he was usually attended round the cloisters
by a group of these (inspiring and inspired) whose hearts, even then,
burnt within them as he talked, and where the sounds yet linger to mock
ELIA on his way, still turning pensive to the past! One of the finest
and rarest parts of Mr. Coleridge's conversation, is when he expatiates
on the Greek tragedians (not that he is not well acquainted, when he
pleases, with the epic poets, or the philosophers, or orators, or
historians of antiquity)--on the subtle reasonings and melting pathos
of Euripides, on the harmonious gracefulness of Sophocles, tuning his
love-laboured song, like sweetest warblings from a sacred grove; on the
high-wrought trumpet-tongued eloquence of Aeschylus, whose Prometheus,
above all, is like an Ode to Fate, and a pleading with Providence, his
thoughts being let loose as his body is chained on his solitary rock,
and his afflicted will (the emblem of mortality)
"Struggling in vain with ruthless destiny."
As the impassioned critic speaks and rises in his theme, you would think
you heard the voice of the Man hated by the Gods, contending with
the wild winds as they roar, and his eye glitters with the spirit of
Antiquity!
Next, he was engaged with Hartley's tribes of mind, "etherial braid,
thought-woven,"--and he busied himself for a year or two with
vibrations and vibratiuncles and the great law of association that binds
all things in its mystic chain, and the doctrine of Necessity (the
mild teacher of Charity) and the Millennium, anticipative of a life to
come--and he plunged deep into the controversy on Matter and Spirit,
and, as an escape from Dr. Priestley's Materialism, where he felt
himself imprisoned by the logician's spell, like Ariel in the
cloven pine-tree, he became suddenly enamoured of Bishop Berkeley's
fairy-world,[A] and used in all companies to build the universe, like
a brave poetical fiction, of fine words--and he was deep-read in
Malebranche, and in Cudworth's Intellectual System (a huge pile of
learning, unwieldy, enormous) and in Lord Brook's hieroglyphic theories,
and in Bishop Butler's Sermons, and in the Duchess of Newcastle's
fantastic folios, and in Clarke and South and Tillotson, and all the
fine thinkers and masculine reasoners of that age--and Leibnitz's
_Pre-established Harmony_ reared its arch above his head, like the
rainbow in the cloud, covenanting with the hopes of man--and then he
fell plump, ten thousand fathoms down (but his wings saved him harmless)
into the _hortus siccus_ of Dissent, where he pared religion down to the
standard of reason and stripped faith of mystery, and preached Christ
crucified and the Unity of the Godhead, and so dwelt for a while in the
spirit with John Huss and Jerome of Prague and Socinus and old John
Zisca, and ran through Neal's History of the Puritans, and Calamy's
Non-Conformists' Memorial, having like thoughts and passions with
them--but then Spinoza became his God, and he took up the vast chain of
being in his hand, and the round world became the centre and the soul of
all things in some shadowy sense, forlorn of meaning, and around him he
beheld the living traces and the sky-pointing proportions of the mighty
Pan--but poetry redeemed him from this spectral philosophy, and he
bathed his heart in beauty, and gazed at the golden light of heaven, and
drank of the spirit of the universe, and wandered at eve by fairy-stream
or fountain,
"------When he saw nought but beauty,
When he heard the voice of that Almighty One
In every breeze that blew, or wave that murmured"--
and wedded with truth in Plato's shade, and in the writings of Proclus
and Plotinus saw the ideas of things in the eternal mind, and unfolded
all mysteries with the Schoolmen and fathomed the depths of Duns Scotus
and Thomas Aquinas, and entered the third heaven with Jacob Behmen, and
walked hand in hand with Swedenborg through the pavilions of the New
Jerusalem, and sung his faith in the promise and in the word in his
_Religious Musings_--and lowering himself from that dizzy height, poised
himself on Milton's wings, and spread out his thoughts in charity with
the glad prose of Jeremy Taylor, and wept over Bowles's Sonnets, and
studied Cowper's blankverse, and betook himself to Thomson's Castle of
Indolence, and sported with the wits of Charles the Second's days and
of Queen Anne, and relished Swift's style and that of the John Bull
(Arbuthnot's we mean, not Mr. Croker's) and dallied with the British
Essayists and Novelists, and knew all qualities of more modern writers
with a learned spirit, Johnson, and Goldsmith, and Junius, and Burke,
and Godwin, and the Sorrows of Werter, and Jean Jacques Rousseau, and
Voltaire, and Marivaux, and Crebillon, and thousands more--now "laughed
with Rabelais in his easy chair" or pointed to Hogarth, or afterwards
dwelt on Claude's classic scenes or spoke with rapture of Raphael,
and compared the women at Rome to figures that had walked out of his
pictures, or visited the Oratory of Pisa, and described the works of
Giotto and Ghirlandaio and Massaccio, and gave the moral of the picture
of the Triumph of Death, where the beggars and the wretched invoke his
dreadful dart, but the rich and mighty of the earth quail and shrink
before it; and in that land of siren sights and sounds, saw a dance of
peasant girls, and was charmed with lutes and gondolas,--or wandered
into Germany and lost himself in the labyrinths of the Hartz Forest and
of the Kantean philosophy, and amongst the cabalistic names of Fichtè
and Schelling and Lessing, and God knows who--this was long after, but
all the former while, he had nerved his heart and filled his eyes
with tears, as he hailed the rising orb of liberty, since quenched in
darkness and in blood, and had kindled his affections at the blaze of
the French Revolution, and sang for joy when the towers of the Bastile
and the proud places of the insolent and the oppressor fell, and would
have floated his bark, freighted with fondest fancies, across the
Atlantic wave with Southey and others to seek for peace and freedom--
"In Philarmonia's undivided dale!"
Alas! "Frailty, thy name is _Genius_!"--What is become of all this
mighty heap of hope, of thought, of learning, and humanity? It has
ended in swallowing doses of oblivion and in writing paragraphs in the
_Courier_.--Such, and so little is the mind of man!
It was not to be supposed that Mr. Coleridge could keep on at the rate
he set off; he could not realize all he knew or thought, and less could
not fix his desultory ambition; other stimulants supplied the place, and
kept up the intoxicating dream, the fever and the madness of his early
impressions. Liberty (the philosopher's and the poet's bride) had fallen
a victim, meanwhile, to the murderous practices of the hag, Legitimacy.
Proscribed by court-hirelings, too romantic for the herd of vulgar
politicians, our enthusiast stood at bay, and at last turned on the
pivot of a subtle casuistry to the _unclean side:_ but his discursive
reason would not let him trammel himself into a poet-laureate or
stamp-distributor, and he stopped, ere he had quite passed that
well-known "bourne from whence no traveller returns"--and so has sunk
into torpid, uneasy repose, tantalized by useless resources, haunted by
vain imaginings, his lips idly moving, but his heart forever still, or,
as the shattered chords vibrate of themselves, making melancholy music
to the ear of memory! Such is the fate of genius in an age, when in the
unequal contest with sovereign wrong, every man is ground to powder who
is not either a born slave, or who does not willingly and at once offer
up the yearnings of humanity and the dictates of reason as a welcome
sacrifice to besotted prejudice and loathsome power.
Of all Mr. Coleridge's productions, the _Ancient Mariner_ is the only
one that we could with confidence put into any person's hands, on whom
we wished to impress a favourable idea of his extraordinary powers. Let
whatever other objections be made to it, it is unquestionably a work of
genius--of wild, irregular, overwhelming imagination, and has that rich,
varied movement in the verse, which gives a distant idea of the lofty or
changeful tones of Mr. Coleridge's voice. In the _Christobel_, there
is one splendid passage on divided friendship. The _Translation of
Schiller's Wallenstein_ is also a masterly production in its kind,
faithful and spirited. Among his smaller pieces there are occasional
bursts of pathos and fancy, equal to what we might expect from him; but
these form the exception, and not the rule. Such, for instance, is his
affecting Sonnet to the author of the Robbers.
Schiller! that hour I would have wish'd to die,
If through the shudd'ring midnight I had sent
From the dark dungeon of the tower time-rent,
That fearful voice, a famish'd father's cry--
That in no after-moment aught less vast
Might stamp me mortal! A triumphant shout
Black horror scream'd, and all her goblin rout
From the more with'ring scene diminish'd pass'd.
Ah! Bard tremendous in sublimity!
Could I behold thee in thy loftier mood,
Wand'ring at eve, with finely frenzied eye,
Beneath some vast old tempest-swinging wood!
Awhile, with mute awe gazing, I would brood,
Then weep aloud in a wild ecstasy.
His Tragedy, entitled _Remorse_, is full of beautiful and striking
passages, but it does not place the author in the first rank of dramatic
writers. But if Mr. Coleridge's works do not place him in that rank,
they injure instead of conveying a just idea of the man, for he himself
is certainly in the first class of general intellect.
If our author's poetry is inferior to his conversation, his prose is
utterly abortive. Hardly a gleam is to be found in it of the brilliancy
and richness of those stores of thought and language that he pours out
incessantly, when they are lost like drops of water in the ground. The
principal work, in which he has attempted to embody his general views of
things, is the FRIEND, of which, though it contains some noble passages
and fine trains of thought, prolixity and obscurity are the most
frequent characteristics.
No two persons can be conceived more opposite in character or genius
than the subject of the present and of the preceding sketch. Mr. Godwin,
with less natural capacity, and with fewer acquired advantages, by
concentrating his mind on some given object, and doing what he had to do
with all his might, has accomplished much, and will leave more than
one monument of a powerful intellect behind him; Mr. Coleridge, by
dissipating his, and dallying with every subject by turns, has done
little or nothing to justify to the world or to posterity, the high
opinion which all who have ever heard him converse, or known him
intimately, with one accord entertain of him. Mr. Godwin's faculties
have kept house, and plied their task in the work-shop of the brain,
diligently and effectually: Mr. Coleridge's have gossipped away their
time, and gadded about from house to house, as if life's business were
to melt the hours in listless talk. Mr. Godwin is intent on a subject,
only as it concerns himself and his reputation; he works it out as a
matter of duty, and discards from his mind whatever does not forward his
main object as impertinent and vain. Mr. Coleridge, on the other hand,
delights in nothing but episodes and digressions, neglects whatever he
undertakes to perform, and can act only on spontaneous impulses, without
object or method. "He cannot be constrained by mastery." While he should
be occupied with a given pursuit, he is thinking of a thousand other
things; a thousand tastes, a thousand objects tempt him, and distract
his mind, which keeps open house, and entertains all comers; and after
being fatigued and amused with morning calls from idle visitors, finds
the day consumed and its business unconcluded. Mr. Godwin, on the
contrary, is somewhat exclusive and unsocial in his habits of mind,
entertains no company but what he gives his whole time and attention to,
and wisely writes over the doors of his understanding, his fancy, and
his senses--"No admittance except on business." He has none of that
fastidious refinement and false delicacy, which might lead him to
balance between the endless variety of modern attainments. He does not
throw away his life (nor a single half-hour of it) in adjusting the
claims of different accomplishments, and in choosing between them or
making himself master of them all. He sets about his task, (whatever
it may be) and goes through it with spirit and fortitude. He has the
happiness to think an author the greatest character in the world,
and himself the greatest author in it. Mr. Coleridge, in writing an
harmonious stanza, would stop to consider whether there was not more
grace and beauty in a _Pas de trois_, and would not proceed till he had
resolved this question by a chain of metaphysical reasoning without end.
Not so Mr. Godwin. That is best to him, which he can do best. He does
not waste himself in vain aspirations and effeminate sympathies. He is
blind, deaf, insensible to all but the trump of Fame. Plays, operas,
painting, music, ball-rooms, wealth, fashion, titles, lords, ladies,
touch him not--all these are no more to him than to the magician in his
cell, and he writes on to the end of the chapter, through good report
and evil report. _Pingo in eternitatem_--is his motto. He neither envies
nor admires what others are, but is contented to be what he is, and
strives to do the utmost he can. Mr. Coleridge has flirted with the
Muses as with a set of mistresses: Mr. Godwin has been married twice, to
Reason and to Fancy, and has to boast no short-lived progeny by each.
So to speak, he has _valves_ belonging to his mind, to regulate the
quantity of gas admitted into it, so that like the bare, unsightly, but
well-compacted steam-vessel, it cuts its liquid way, and arrives at
its promised end: while Mr. Coleridge's bark, "taught with the little
nautilus to sail," the sport of every breath, dancing to every wave,
"Youth at its prow, and Pleasure at its helm,"
flutters its gaudy pennons in the air, glitters in the sun, but we wait
in vain to hear of its arrival in the destined harbour. Mr. Godwin, with
less variety and vividness, with less subtlety and susceptibility
both of thought and feeling, has had firmer nerves, a more determined
purpose, a more comprehensive grasp of his subject, and the results are
as we find them. Each has met with his reward: for justice has, after
all, been done to the pretensions of each; and we must, in all cases,
use means to ends!
[Footnote A: Mr. Coleridge named his eldest son (the writer of some
beautiful Sonnets) after Hartley, and the second after Berkeley. The
third was called Derwent, after the river of that name. Nothing can be
more characteristic of his mind than this circumstance. All his ideas
indeed are like a river, flowing on for ever, and still murmuring as it
flows, discharging its waters and still replenished--
"And so by many winding nooks it strays,
With willing sport to the wild ocean!"]
* * * * *
REV. MR. IRVING.
This gentleman has gained an almost unprecedented, and not an altogether
unmerited popularity as a preacher. As he is, perhaps, though a burning
and a shining light, not "one of the fixed," we shall take this
opportunity of discussing his merits, while he is at his meridian
height; and in doing so, shall "nothing extenuate, nor set down aught in
malice."
Few circumstances shew the prevailing and preposterous rage for novelty
in a more striking point of view, than the success of Mr. Irving's
oratory. People go to hear him in crowds, and come away with a mixture
of delight and astonishment--they go again to see if the effect will
continue, and send others to try to find out the mystery--and in the
noisy conflict between extravagant encomiums and splenetic objections,
the true secret escapes observation, which is, that the whole thing is,
nearly from beginning to end, a _transposition of ideas_. If the subject
of these remarks had come out as a player, with all his advantages of
figure, voice, and action, we think he would have failed: if, as a
preacher, he had kept within the strict bounds of pulpit-oratory, he
would scarcely have been much distinguished among his Calvinistic
brethren: as a mere author, he would have excited attention rather
by his quaintness and affectation of an obsolete style and mode of
thinking, than by any thing else. But he has contrived to jumble these
several characters together in an unheard-of and unwarranted manner, and
the fascination is altogether irresistible. Our Caledonian divine is
equally an anomaly in religion, in literature, in personal appearance,
and in public speaking. To hear a person spout Shakspeare on the stage
is nothing--the charm is nearly worn out--but to hear any one spout
Shakspeare (and that not in a sneaking under-tone, but at the top of
his voice, and with the full breadth of his chest) from a Calvinistic
pulpit, is new and wonderful. The _Fancy_ have lately lost something of
their gloss in public estimation, and after the last fight, few would go
far to see a Neat or a Spring set-to;--but to see a man who is able to
enter the ring with either of them, or brandish a quarter-staff with
Friar Tuck, or a broad-sword with Shaw the Lifeguards' man, stand up in
a strait-laced old-fashioned pulpit, and bandy dialectics with modern
philosophers or give a _cross-buttock_ to a cabinet minister, there is
something in a sight like this also, that is a cure for sore eyes. It
is as if Crib or Molyneux had turned Methodist parson, or as if
a Patagonian savage were to come forward as the patron-saint of
Evangelical religion. Again, the doctrine of eternal punishment was one
of the staple arguments with which, everlastingly drawled out, the old
school of Presbyterian divines used to keep their audiences awake, or
lull them to sleep; but to which people of taste and fashion paid
little attention, as inelegant and barbarous, till Mr. Irving, with his
cast-iron features and sledge-hammer blows, puffing like a grim Vulcan,
set to work to forge more classic thunderbolts, and kindle the expiring
flames anew with the very sweepings of sceptical and infidel
libraries, so as to excite a pleasing horror in the female part of his
congregation. In short, our popular declaimer has, contrary to the
Scripture-caution, put new wine into old bottles, or new cloth on old
garments. He has, with an unlimited and daring licence, mixed the
sacred and the profane together, the carnal and the spiritual man, the
petulance of the bar with the dogmatism of the pulpit, the theatrical
and theological, the modern and the obsolete;--what wonder that this
splendid piece of patchwork, splendid by contradiction and contrast,
has delighted some and confounded others? The more serious part of his
congregation indeed complain, though not bitterly, that their pastor
has converted their meeting-house into a play-house: but when a lady of
quality, introducing herself and her three daughters to the preacher,
assures him that they have been to all the most fashionable places of
resort, the opera, the theatre, assemblies, Miss Macauley's readings,
and Exeter-Change, and have been equally entertained no where else, we
apprehend that no remonstrances of a committee of ruling-elders will be
able to bring him to his senses again, or make him forego such sweet,
but ill-assorted praise. What we mean to insist upon is, that Mr. Irving
owes his triumphant success, not to any one quality for which he has
been extolled, but to a combination of qualities, the more striking
in their immediate effect, in proportion as they are unlooked-for and
heterogeneous, like the violent opposition of light and shade in a
picture. We shall endeavour to explain this view of the subject more at
large.
Mr. Irving, then, is no common or mean man. He has four or five
qualities, possessed in a moderate or in a paramount degree, which,
added or multiplied together, fill up the important space he occupies in
the public eye. Mr. Irving's intellect itself is of a superior order; he
has undoubtedly both talents and acquirements beyond the ordinary run of
every-day preachers. These alone, however, we hold, would not account
for a twentieth part of the effect he has produced: they would have
lifted him perhaps out of the mire and slough of sordid obscurity, but
would never have launched him into the ocean-stream of popularity, in
which he "lies floating many a rood;"--but to these he adds uncommon
height, a graceful figure and action, a clear and powerful voice, a
striking, if not a fine face, a bold and fiery spirit, and a most
portentous obliquity of vision, which throw him to an immeasurable
distance beyond all competition, and effectually relieve whatever there
might be of common-place or bombast in his style of composition. Put the
case that Mr. Irving had been five feet high--Would he ever have been
heard of, or, as he does now, have "bestrode the world like a Colossus?"
No, the thing speaks for itself. He would in vain have lifted
his Lilliputian arm to Heaven, people would have laughed at his
monkey-tricks. Again, had he been as tall as he is, but had wanted other
recommendations, he would have been nothing.
"The player's province they but vainly try,
Who want these powers, deportment, voice, and eye."