that an adjournment might take place in case of 'physical necessity,'
but the only previous case of an adjournment cited was that of Canning
(in 1753).
[10] This case was in 1665. It is curious that in the case of
Hathaway, in 1702, a precisely similar experiment convinced everybody
that the accuser was an impostor; and got him a whipping and a place
in the pillory.
_COLERIDGE_[11]
In the period which intervened between the Great War and the first
Reform Bill, there were two centres of intellectual light in England.
Jeremy Bentham, in his cheerful old age, reached his eightieth
birthday in 1828, still, as he phrased it, codifying like any dragon,
solving all problems by the application of his famous formula about
the greatest happiness of the greatest number, and adding day by day
to the vast piles of manuscript which were to embody the principles of
all future legislation. To his hermitage in Westminster were admitted
a little group of chosen disciples, the stern political economists,
rigid utilitarians, and energetic reformers, some of whom were in the
coming years to assume the title of philosophical radicals. Another
band of enthusiasts sought a different shrine. They listened to an
oracle which taught them that utilitarianism was 'moral anarchy,'
political economy a 'solemn humbug,' radicalism the direct road to
ruin, and true wisdom only to be found in regions of contemplation
which Bentham could never enter—for a reason analogous to that which
forbids pachydermatous quadrupeds to soar into the empyrean. We know
pretty well what was the manner of man at whose feet these disciples
sat. The keenest of contemporary observers has left a picture which
must be laid under contribution for every description of Coleridge.
Carlyle saw an old man—though in point of actual years he was
Bentham's junior by nearly a quarter of a century—with the brow of
a philosopher and the eye of a poet, but with the irresolute flabby
mouth of a sensuous dreamer of dreams, consuming cups of tea, lukewarm
but better than he deserved, or strolling, corkscrew fashion, along
both sides of a garden path, unable to make up his mind to either. You
put him a question; he replied by accumulating 'formidable apparatus,
logical swim-bladders, transcendental life-preservers, and other
precautionary and vehiculatory gear for setting out;' but rambled
into the universe at large, treated you 'as a mere passive bucket, to
be pumped into' (fancy a Carlyle for a passive bucket!), and finally
left you 'swimming and fluttering in the mistiest wide unintelligible
deluge of things, for the most part in a rather profitless
uncomfortable manner.' Yet, at times, we are told, 'balmy sunny
islets, islets of the blest and intelligible,' would rise out of the
haze; and upon these islets the enthusiastic Sterling and others would
try to cast anchor. Had they reached the solid foundation of creation,
or had they, like Milton's pilot of the small night-foundered skiff,
mistaken some metaphysical Kraken for the permanent framework of
things?
That question may be answered dogmatically by any one who pleases.
Immovable limits of time and capacity forbid me from attempting
to answer it now. My excuse for venturing to say something of
Coleridge—certainly one of the most fascinating and most perplexing
figures in our literary history—is simply this: I have been forced
to investigate with some care the details of his career; and I ought
to be able not to answer the question, but to provide a little
'vehiculatory gear' towards answering it. Coleridge's philosophy must
of course be judged by considerations extraneous to his personal
history. Yet I think, as a professional biographer is in duty bound
to think, that philosophy is, more often than philosophers admit,
the outcome of personal experience; and Coleridge's singular history
may throw some light upon his teaching. Here we meet the hagiologist
and the iconoclast, the twin plagues of the humble biographer. The
hagiologist burns incense before his idol till it is difficult to
distinguish any fixed outline through the clouds of gorgeously-tinted
vapour. Coleridge thought himself to have certain failings. His
relations fully agreed with him. His worshippers regard these meek
confessions as mere illustrations of the good man's humility, and even
manage to endow the poet and philosopher with all the homely virtues
of the respectable and the solvent. To put forward such claims is to
challenge the iconoclast. He, a person endowed by nature with a fine
stock of virtuous indignation, has very little trouble in picturing
the poet-philosopher as a shambling, unreliable, indolent voluptuary,
to whom an action became impossible so soon as it presented itself
as a duty, and who, even as a man of genius, must be condemned as
unfaithful to his high calling. And so we raise the usual edifying
discussion as to the privileges of genius. Do they include superiority
to the Ten Commandments? Can you expect a poet to confine himself
to one wife? May a man neglect his children because he has written
the 'Ancient Mariner' and 'Christabel'?—points of casuistry, of
which, with your leave, I will postpone the consideration to a future
occasion.
For my purpose it is enough to ascertain the facts. I have not
to decide whether Coleridge should receive excommunication or
canonisation; whether he deserved to go straight to heaven or to pass
a period—and, if so, how long a period—in purgatory. It is difficult
to settle such questions satisfactorily. I desiderate an accurate
diagnosis, not a judicial sentence. Coleridge sinned and repented. I
take note of sin and of repentance as indications of character. I do
not pretend to say whether in the eye of Heaven the repentance would
be an adequate set-off for the sin. But I premise one apology for
anything that may sound iconoclastic, and which I think is worth the
consideration of the amiable persons who undertake to rehabilitate
soiled reputations. A man's weakness can rarely be overlooked without
underestimating his strength. If Coleridge's intellect were, as De
Quincey said in his magniloquent way, 'the greatest and most spacious,
the subtlest and most comprehensive, that has yet existed among men'
(what a philosopher one must be to pronounce such a judgment!) why
were the results so small? Because the ethereal soul was chained to a
fleshly carcase. To deny this is to force us to assume that what he
did was all that he could do. You must either exaggerate his actual
achievements beyond all possible limits, or save your belief in his
potential achievements by admitting that his intellect never had fair
play.
Let us consider the antecedents of the prophet of Highgate Hill. Was
there ever a young man fuller of intellectual promise or of personal
charm than the youth of twenty-five, who, in 1797, rambled through
the Quantocks discussing and composing poetry with Wordsworth?
Circumstances apparently unfavourable had only served to stimulate
his intellectual growth. Separated from his family in infancy, to
become one of the victims of our public school system—ill-fed,
ill-nursed, and ill-taught at Christ's Hospital; urged upon the
treadmill of a sound classical education by a rigid schoolmaster,
he had assimilated with singular aptitude whatever intellectual
food had drifted within his reach. He had caught glimpses of high
metaphysical secrets; he had peered into the mysteries of medical
practice; he had bolted a miscellaneous library whole; he had been
infected with poetical enthusiasm by the study of that minute
day-star, W. L. Bowles; and he had completed his training by falling
desperately in love with the inevitable sister of a schoolfellow. It
is a comfort to reflect that the best regulated systems of education
break down somewhere. Coleridge, it would have seemed, ran every
risk of being driven sheep-like along the dull high road of Latin
grammar. Nature had prompted him to leap the fences, to expatiate
in the wide fields of intellectual and imaginative pasture, and to
derive a keener zest for his nourishment from the knowledge that the
indulgence was illegitimate. Cambridge, the mother of poets, received
him with the kindness she had so often shown to her children. We—I
speak as a Cambridge man—we flogged (or nearly flogged) Milton into
republicanism; we disgusted Dryden into an anomalous and monstrous
preference for Oxford; we bored Gray till, half stifled with academic
dulness, he sought more cheerful surroundings in a country churchyard;
we left Byron to the congenial society of his bear; we did nothing for
Wordsworth, except, indeed, that we took him to Milton's rooms, and
there for once (it must really have done him some good) induced him
to take a glass too much; and we, as nearly as possible, converted
Coleridge into a heavy dragoon. We ordered him to bow the knee to
Euclid, and to Newton's 'Principia,' the only idols whose merits were
altogether beyond his powers of appreciation, and by such kindness
in disguise induced him to plunge into a precocious breach with the
proprieties. A fellowship might have converted him into a solid Church
and State don, an oracle of the Combination Room, and a sound judge
of port wine. We sternly withheld the temptation. A reformer has to
start in life as a rebel. Coleridge sympathised with the rebellious
William Frend, who was being banished from Cambridge for excessive
liberalism. He offered his youthful incense to Priestley, the
'patriot and saint and sage'—so the young enthusiast called him—who
was soon to be expelled by the exuberant loyalty of Birmingham from
an ungrateful country. Though never a Jacobin, he became what, in
some form or other, a young man ought to become—an enthusiast for
the newest lights, a partisan of the ideas struggling to remould the
ancient order and raise the aspirations of mankind. The Master of
the College shook his reverend head, kindly enough at times, at the
lad's vagaries, and forgave him even for that preposterous attempt to
become a trooper which never enabled him, with all his subtlety of
distinction, to form any clear conception of the difference between a
horse's head and its tail. But he could not run in the regular track.
He was thrown into the chaotic world to sink or swim by his unassisted
abilities. No man had, in some ways, a better floating apparatus. The
poetic vein, soon to manifest itself in his best work, was indeed
still turbid with the alloy of didactic twaddle. But already he had
the versatility, the inherent vitality of intellect, the power of
embodying philosophic thoughts in poetic imagery, which made him
unrivalled in monologue. He talked better, I am apt to think, with
his chum, Charles Lamb, at the 'Cat and Salutation,' than he ever
talked to his worshippers at Highgate Hill. A man is at his best
before he is recognised. Coleridge's early letters and essays show
the fulness and intellectual vigour, without the too elaborate and
slightly sanctimonious circumgyrations, of his later effusions. And
his genius was such as implied a double portion of the power of making
friends, which, with most of us, wanes so lamentably as the years
go by. Lamb, his earliest and latest friend, was already devoted to
this brilliant schoolfellow; and if Lamb was an easy conquest, men of
less conspicuously tender nature were equally attracted. He had only
to meet Southey at Oxford to swear at once an eternal friendship—a
friendship to be cemented by a regeneration of the world.
Coleridge was to be the Plato of a new society to be founded in the
wilds of America. There a short and healthy space of daily toil was to
provide all that was necessary for a band of poets and philosophers,
too benevolent to care for separate property, and worthy founders of
an Arcadia of perfect simplicity, refinement, and equality. As for the
Eves of the Paradise, were there not three Miss Frickers? Coleridge
repelled for a time the too obvious foreboding that Pantisocracy
was but a province of dreamland. Dreamland was his reality. For the
demands of butchers and bakers he had still a lordly indifference.
He had the voice which could charm even a publisher. The prim and
priggish Cottle was at once annexed by Coleridge, and all the natural
caution of a tradesman did not withhold him from promising a guinea
for every hundred lines to be produced by a still untried new poet.
What were one hundred lines to the genius which could turn off an
act of a tragedy in a morning, and which soon afterwards could build
the shadowy palace of Kubla Khan in a dream? Coleridge was justified,
in point of bare prudence, in marrying at once on the prospect.
Somehow the poetry did not come so fast as the bills. But Coleridge
had other strings to his bow. He set up as a lecturer and journalist.
His marvellous eloquence condescended for the nonce to wile promises
of subscription even from dealers in tallow; and the philosopher—not
without a humorous sense of his own absurdity—became a successful
commercial traveller. The newspaper of course collapsed almost on the
spot. All the arrangements were absurd, and Coleridge's eloquence
proved to be somehow uncongenial to the tallow-dealing interest. But
meanwhile, in the course of his journey, Coleridge had incidentally
and, as it were, by the mere side glance of his eye, swept up
Charles Lloyd, son of a rich banker, who, fascinated and enthralled,
left the bank to become an inmate of his teacher's house, and, no
doubt, a contributor to its expenses. Poole, a most public-spirited
and intelligent man, offered him an asylum at Nether Stowey. The
Unitarians, to whom he more or less belonged, were ready to open their
pulpit to a preacher whose eloquence promised to rival even the most
splendid traditions of the age of Leighton and Jeremy Taylor.
Hazlitt, not yet soured and savage, heard Coleridge preach in 1798;
and tells us in true Hazlittian style how his voice rose like a storm
of rich distilled perfumes; how he launched into his subject like an
eagle dallying with the wind; how, in brief, poetry and philosophy had
met together, truth and genius had embraced under the eye and with the
sanction of reason. The Unitarian firmament was too cramped for this
brilliant meteor; the philosophy expounded from the pulpits seemed to
him meagre and rigid; and, while hesitating, he received an offer from
the generous Wedgwoods, anxious to spend some part of their wealth in
the patronage of genius.
Rumours had reached England by this time that a great intellectual
light had arisen in Germany. The Wedgwoods gave Coleridge a modest
annuity, unfettered (as I can now say) by any condition whatever, a
fact which makes the subsequent withdrawal a harsher measure than has
been supposed. Coleridge resolved to go to Germany, catch the sacred
fire of the Kantian philosophy, and return to England to regenerate
the mind of his countrymen. He started in September 1798, when he
was just twenty-six, in company with the friend who alone could be
compared to him in intellectual power. Wordsworth had been attracted,
as Lamb and Southey had been attracted before him. Coleridge and
Wordsworth had discussed the principles of their common art; and
Coleridge had applied them in those wonderful poems, the 'Ancient
Mariner' and 'Christabel' (the first part), which were to be but the
prologue to a fuller utterance; a wonderful prologue, for, though
followed by nothing, it remained unique and inimitable. Coleridge was
not yet _déterré_, as Pope said of Johnson; the ordinary critics had
only a passing smile or sneer for the little clique which published
its obscure utterances in a provincial town. Monthly and critical
reviewers—the arbiters of taste—would have been astonished to hear
that Coleridge and Wordsworth and Lamb and Southey would soon stand
in the very front ranks of English literature; and he must have a
clearer conscience than I who would cast a stone at critics for not
at once detecting the first germs of rising genius. But, as _ex
post facto_ prophets, we are able to see that Coleridge already
had not only given proofs of astonishing power, but had won what
was even more valuable, the true sympathy and cordial affection of
young men who were the distinct leaders of the next generation. Even
material support was not wanting from such men as Poole and Wedgwood,
sufficient to ensure a fair start for the little band of prophets. We
should have been justified in foretelling, with unusual confidence, a
career of surpassing brilliancy for the youth, of whom it seemed only
questionable whether he would choose to be a second Bacon or a second
Milton.
And if, at that time, any one could have shown us the same Coleridge
at a distance of eighteen years, the worn, depressed, prematurely aged
man who took up his abode with Gillman in 1816, we should have been
shocked, and yet, perhaps, have been able to utter our complacent
'I told you so.' What so far had been the achievements of the most
brilliant genius of the generation: a man not only of surpassing
ability, but of surpassing facility of utterance; a man whom to set
going at any moment was to unlock a perpetually flowing fountain
of abounding eloquence? A few newspaper articles and some courses
of lectures, he said in 1817, constituted his whole publicity. It
may be added that he had jotted down on the margins of books enough
detached thoughts to have made some volumes of admirable reflections.
But he had achieved nothing to suggest concentrated thought or
sustained labour. In a shorter period Scott poured out the whole
of the Waverley Novels, besides discharging official duties, and
writing a number of reviews and miscellaneous works. I say nothing
as to the quality. I am simply thinking of the amount of work; and
Coleridge's work cost little labour, for his power of improvisation
was among his most marvellous faculties. Why, then, was the work so
limited in quantity? The internal facts are sufficiently significant.
After his return from Germany in the autumn of 1799, he wrote some
articles which certainly proved that his intellect was in full
vigour, translated 'Wallenstein,' and then, in 1800, retired with
his family to Keswick. Here at once ominous symptoms begin to show
themselves. A strange disquiet is betrayed in his letters; there are
painful complaints of ill-health; his poetic inspiration breathes
its last in the 'Ode to Dejection.' He sought in vain to distract
painful thought by metaphysical abstractions; he rambled off in
1804 to spend two years and a half in Malta and Italy. Returning to
England, he tried lecturing at the Royal Institution, and then settled
at Grasmere—separated by fifteen miles of mountain roads from his
wife—and repeated his 'Watchman' experiment by writing the 'Friend.'
The youthful buoyancy, even flippancy, has departed, though it shows
far riper thought and richer intellectual stores. But weariness
of spirit marks every page; the long sentences somehow suggest a
succession of stifled groans; as the enterprise proceeds, it can
only be kept up by introducing any irrelevant matter that may be on
hand—such as old letters from Germany which happened to be in his
portfolio, and an extravagant panegyric upon his patron at Malta, Sir
Alexander Ball.
The 'Friend' soon falls dead, and Coleridge drifts back to London.
There he makes efforts, pathetic in their impotence, to keep his head
above water. He tries journalism again, but without the occasional
triumphs which had formerly atoned for his irregularity. He lectures,
and is heard with an interest which shows that, in spite of all
impediments, his marvellous powers have at least roused the curiosity
of all who claim to have an intellectual taste. He has a gleam of
success, too, from the production of his old tragedy, 'Remorse,'
written in the days of early vigour. But some undertow seems to be
sucking him back, so that he can never get his feet planted on dry
land. He retires to Bristol, and thence to Calne, where he seems to
be sinking into utter obscurity. He has almost passed out of the
knowledge of his friends, when a last despairing effort lands him at
Highgate, and there a rather singular transformation, it may seem at
first sight, enables him to become the oracle of youthful aspiration,
wisdom, and virtue. Painfully, and imperfectly with their aid, he
gathers together some fragments of actual achievement—enough to
justify a great, but a most tantalising reputation.
What was the secret of this painful history? Briefly, it was
opium. Coleridge said so himself, and all his biographers have
stated the facts. Without this statement the whole story would be
unintelligible, and we could have done justice neither to Coleridge's
intellectual powers nor even to some of his virtues. To tell the
story of Coleridge without the opium is to tell the story of Hamlet
without mentioning the Ghost. The tragedy of a life would become a
mere string of incoherent accidents. Nor are the facts doubtful.
Coleridge, I fear, composed, or invented, for the benefit of Gillman,
a certain picturesque 'Kendal black drop'—a treacherous nostrum, it
is suggested, which gave him relief in his sufferings at Keswick, and
overpowered his will before he had recognised its nature. The truth
is, as can be abundantly proved by his letters at the time, that he
was taking laudanum in large quantities in 1796, that is when he was
just twenty-four, under the pressure of illness, but certainly well
knowing what he was taking. It was at Keswick, not that he first
indulged, but that he first became aware of his almost hopeless
enslavement.