confess that I think it less remarkable that his demoralisation in
this respect seemed to be complete about 1814, than that he succeeded,
under Gillman's care, in so far breaking off the habit as to make a
certain salvage from the wreck. I simply take note of these facts,
and leave anybody who pleases to do the moralising; but I am forced
to add a few words upon another topic, to which his apologists have
resorted in order to extenuate the opium-eating. Briefly, it has been
attempted to save his character by abusing his wife. Undoubtedly, as
the recently published Coleorton papers prove, there was a complete
want of sympathy. The same documents show that it was not, as had been
generally supposed, a case of gradual drifting apart. Proposals for
a regular separation had been made by the time of Coleridge's return
from Malta. Coleridge's apologists have said that Mrs. Coleridge
was one of Iago's women, born 'to suckle fools and chronicle small
beer,' and quite unable to appreciate Kantian metaphysics, or even
'Christabel.' A very doubtful legend has been put about, that she
once said, 'Get oop, Coleridge' (a remark for which one can conceive
a sufficient justification), and no man can be expected to care for a
woman who says 'Get oop,' or for her children. From letters of hers
which I have seen, I am inclined to think that Mrs. Coleridge must
really have been a very sensible woman, who worked hard to educate her
own children and the children of her sister, Mrs. Southey, in French
and Italian, and who could express herself in remarkably good English.
She was no doubt inappreciative of a genius which could not be set
to bread-winning. And moreover, when a man has an ecstatic admiration
for another woman, it is not likely to make his relations to his wife
more pleasant. To speak of all this as a moral excuse for Coleridge is
to my mind unmanly. If a man of genius condescends to marry a woman,
and be the father of her children, he must incur responsibilities. The
fact that he leaves her, as Coleridge did, his small fixed income, the
balance of her expenses to be made up by his brother-in-law and other
connections, is so far to his credit, but does not excuse him for a
neglect of those duties, not to be measured in pounds, shillings, and
pence, which a husband and father owes to an innocent woman and three
small children. Coleridge's position was no doubt difficult, but the
mode in which he solved the difficulty is a proof that opium-eating is
inconsistent with certain homely duties.
An experienced person has said, 'Do not marry a man of genius.' I have
no personal interest in that question, nor will I express any opinion
upon it, but one is inclined to say, Don't be his brother-in-law, or
his publisher, or his editor, or anything that is his if you care
twopence—it is probably an excessive valuation—for the opinion of
posthumous critics.
But, again, I would avoid moralising. I only ask what is the true
inference as to Coleridge's character. And that consideration may
bring us back to less painful reflections. It is preposterous to
maintain the thesis that Coleridge was the kind of person to be held
up as a pattern to young men about to marry. Opium had ruined the
power of will, never very strong, and any capacity he may have had—and
his versatility was perhaps incompatible with any great capacity—for
concentration on a great task. The consequences of such indulgence had
ruined his home life, and all but ruined his intellectual career. But
there is also this to be said, that at his worst Coleridge was both
loved and eminently lovable. His failings excited far more compassion
than indignation. The 'pity of it' expresses the sentiment of all
eye-witnesses. He was always full of kindly feelings, never soured
into cynicism. The strange power of fascination which he had shown in
his poetic youth never deserted him. As De Quincey has said: 'Beyond
all men who ever perhaps have lived, he found means to engage a
constant succession of most faithful friends. He received the services
of sisters, brothers, daughters, sons, from the hands of strangers
attracted to him by no possible impulses but those of reverence for
his intellect and love for his gracious nature. Perpetual relays were
laid along his path in life of zealous and judicious supporters.'
Whenever Coleridge was at his lowest, some one was ready to help him.
Poole, and Lloyd, and Wedgwood, and De Quincey, had come forward in
their turn. Through the dismal years of degradation which preceded his
final refuge at Gillman's, the faithful Morgans had made him a home,
tried to break off his bad habits, and enabled him to carry on the
almost hopeless struggle. When Morgan himself became bankrupt, it is
pleasant to know that Coleridge, among whose faults pecuniary meanness
had no place, gave what he could—and far more than he could really
spare—to help his old friend. When he delivered his lectures or poured
out an amazing monologue at Lamb's suppers, or in Godwin's shop, young
men, at the age of hero-worship, were already prepared not only to
wonder at the intellectual display, but to feel their hearts warmed
by the real goodness shining through the shattered and imperfectly
transparent vessel. Coleridge's letters may reveal some part of this
charm, though some part, too, of the drawback. His long involved
sentences; compared by himself to a Surinam toad with a brood of
little toads escaping from his back, wind about in something between a
spoken reverie and a sympathetic effusion of confidential confessions.
When they touch the practical, _e.g._ publishers' accounts, they
are apt to become hopelessly unintelligible. When they expound a
vast scheme for a _magnum opus_, or one of the various _magna opera_
which at any time for thirty years were just ready to issue from
the press, as soon as a few pages were transcribed, we perceive,
after a moment, that they are not the fictions of the begging-letter
writer, but a kind of secretion, spontaneously and unconsciously
evolved to pacify the stings of remorse. There are moments when
he is querulous, but we must forgive them to the man who had been
hopelessly distanced in popular fame by his inferiors; whose attempts
at public utterance had utterly collapsed; whose 'Wallenstein' still
encumbered his publisher's shelves; whose poetical copyrights had
been deliberately valued at _nil_; and whose name was only mentioned
in the chief reviews as a superlative for wilful eccentricity and
absurdity. And then, at every turn, we come upon frequent gleams,
not only of subtle thought and imaginative expression, but of shrewd
common-sense, and even at times of a genuine humour, which seems to
imply that Lamb was partly serious when he said that Coleridge had
so much 'f-f-fun' in him. After reading many of the letters, which
still remain unpublished, I may say that it is my own conviction
that a life of Coleridge may still be put together by some judicious
writer, who should take Boswell rather than the 'Acta Sanctorum' for
his model, which would be as interesting as the great 'Confessions,'
which should by turns remind us of Augustine, of Montaigne, and of
Rousseau, and sometimes, too, of the inimitable Pepys or Boswell
himself; which should show the blending of the many elements of a most
complex character and a most versatile and opulent intellect; which
should often call forth wonder, and smiles, and sighs, and indignation
smothered by pity, in one of those unique combinations which it
would take a Shakespeare to portray and act, and defy the skill of a
psychologist to define.
Only a faint indication of this is to be found in Coleridge's
'Apologia,' or, as he called it, his 'Biographia Literaria,' of which
I must now say a word. It was written at his very nadir, and published
just after he had reached his asylum at Highgate. In this sense it
has a special biographical value, though its statements, coloured by
the illusions to which he was then specially subject, have passed
muster too easily with his biographers. Its aim is chiefly to protest
against the neglect of the public and the dispensers of patronage.
Such complaints generally remind me of a rifleman complaining that the
target persists in keeping out of the line of fire. But if we must
pardon something to a man so grievously tried for endeavouring to
shift a part of the responsibility upon other shoulders than his own,
we must be upon our guard against accepting censures which involve
injustice to others. Nothing but Coleridge's strange illusions could
be an apology, for example, for his complaints that the Ministry had
not rewarded a writer whose greatest successes had been scornful
denunciations of their great leader, Pitt. The book, of course, is put
together with a pitchfork. It is without form or proportion, and is
finally eked out with a batch of the old letters from Germany which
he had already used in the 'Friend,' and apparently kept as a last
resource to stop the mouths of printers.
Now it is remarkable that even at this time, when his demoralisation
had gone furthest, he could still pour out many pages of criticism,
quite irrelevant to the professed purpose of the book, and yet such as
was beyond and above the range of any living contemporary. Coleridge
at his worst lost the power of finishing and concentrating—of which he
had never had very much—but not the power of discursive reflection.
He must be compared not to a tree, which has lost its vital fibre,
but to a vine deprived of its props, which, though most of its fruit
is crushed and wasted, can yet produce grapes with the full bloom of
what might have been a superlative vintage. But there is one fact of
the 'Biographia' for which the apology of illusion is more requisite
even than for his misstatements of fact. Coleridge has often been
accused of plagiarism. I do not believe that he stole his Shakespeare
criticism from Schlegel, and, partly at least, for the reason which
would induce me to acquit a supposed thief of having stolen a pair
of breeches from a wild Highlandman. But it is undeniable that
Coleridge was guilty of a serious theft of metaphysical wares. The
only excuse suggested is that the theft was too certain of exposure
to be perpetrated. But as it certainly was perpetrated, this can only
be an apology for the motive. The simple fact is that part of his
scheme was to establish his claims to be a great metaphysician. But
it takes much trouble and some thought to put together what looks
like a chain of _à priori_ demonstration of abstract principles.
Coleridge, therefore, persuaded himself that he had really anticipated
Schelling's thoughts and might justifiably appropriate Schelling's
words. He threw out a few phrases about 'genial coincidence'—perhaps
the happiest circumlocution ever devised for what Pistol called
'conveying'—and adopted Schelling in the lump. When he had come to an
end of Schelling's guidance, he proceeded—with an infantile simplicity
which disarms indignation—to write a solemn complimentary letter from
himself to himself, pointing out that the public would have had enough
of the discussion, and 'Dear C.' politely agreed to drop the subject,
with proper compliments to his 'affectionate, etc.'
And now I come to the very difficult task of indicating, as briefly
as I can, the bearing of these remarks upon Coleridge's multifarious
activity. It is not possible to sum up in a few phrases the
characteristics of a man who wrote upon metaphysics, theology, morals,
politics, and literary criticism; who made a deep impression in all
the departments of thought; whose utterances are scattered up and
down in fragmentary treatises, in complex arguments which generally
break off in the middle, and in miscellaneous jottings upon the
margins of books; whose opinions have been differently interpreted by
different disciples, and have in great part to be inferred from his
comments upon other writers, and can only be intelligible when we have
settled what those writers meant, and what he took them to mean; who
frequently changed his mind, and who certainly appears, to thinkers
of a different order, to add obscurity even to subjects which are
necessarily obscure. Nor is the difficulty diminished when, as in my
case, the commentator belongs to what must be called the antagonistic
school, and is even most properly to be described as a thorough
Philistine who is dull enough to glory in his Philistinism. All that
I shall attempt is to select a certain aspect of the Coleridgian
impulse, and to say what impression it makes upon a radically prosaic
mind.
The brilliant Coleridge of Nether Stowey, the buoyant young
poet-philosopher who had not been to Germany, was still a curious
compound of imperfectly fused elements. His Liberalism had led him
to the Unitarianism of Priestley and the associative philosophy of
Hartley. But he had also dipped into Plotinus and into some of the
mystical writers who represent the very opposite pole of speculation.
The first doctrine was imposed upon him from without, the other was
that which was really congenial to his temperament. For Coleridge was,
above all, essentially and intrinsically a poet. The first genuine
manifestations of his genius are the poems which he wrote before he
was twenty-six. The germ of all Coleridge's utterances may be found—by
a little ingenuity—in the 'Ancient Mariner.' For what is the secret of
the strange charm of that unique achievement? I do not speak of what
may be called its purely literary merits—the melody of versification,
the command of language, the vividness of the descriptive passages,
and so forth—I leave such points to critics of finer perception and a
greater command of superlatives. But part, at least, of the secret is
the ease with which Coleridge moves in a world of which the machinery
(as the old critics called it) is supplied by the mystic philosopher.
Milton, as Penseroso, implores
The spirit of Plato to unfold,
What worlds or what vast systems hold
The spirit of man that hath forsook
Her mansion in this fleshy nook,
And of those demons that are found
In fire, air, flood, and underground,
Whose powers have a true consent
With planet and with element.
If such a man fell asleep in his 'high lonely tower' his dreams
would present to him in sensuous imagery the very world in which
the strange history of the 'Ancient Mariner' was transacted. It
is a world in which both animated things, and stones, and brooks,
and clouds, and plants are moved by spiritual agency; in which, as
he would put it, the veil of the senses is nothing but a symbolism
everywhere telling of unseen and supernatural forces. What we call
the solid and the substantial becomes a dream; and the dream is the
true underlying reality. The difference between such poetry, and
the poetry of Pope, or even of Gray, or Goldsmith, or Cowper—poetry
which is the direct utterance of a string of moral, political, or
religious reflections—implies a literary revolution. Coleridge, even
more distinctly than Wordsworth, represented a deliberate rejection of
the canons of the preceding school; for, if Wordsworth's philosophy
differed from that of Pope, he still taught by direct exposition
instead of the presentation of sensuous symbolism. The distinction
might be illustrated by the ingenious criticism of Mrs. Barbauld,
who told Coleridge that the 'Ancient Mariner' had two faults—it was
improbable and had no moral. Coleridge owned the improbability,
but replied to the other stricture that it had too much moral, for
that it ought to have had no more than a story in the 'Arabian
Nights.' Indeed, the moral, which would apparently be that people who
sympathise with a man who shoots an albatross will die in prolonged
torture of thirst, is open to obvious objections.
Coleridge's poetical impulse died early; perhaps, as De Quincey said,
it was killed by the opium; or as Coleridge said himself, that his
afflictions had suspended what nature gave him at his birth,
His shaping spirit of imagination.
So that his only plan was
From his own nature all the natural man,
By abstruse research to steal,
and partly, too, I should guess, for the reason that this strange
mystic world in which he was at home was so remote from all ordinary
experience that it failed even to provide an efficient symbolism for
his deepest thoughts, and could only be accessible in the singular
glow and fervour of youthful inspiration. The domestic anxieties,
the pains of ill-health, the depression produced by opium, were a
heavy clog upon an imagination which should try to soar into vast
aerial regions. But it may be doubtful whether this peculiar vein of
imagination, opened in the 'Ancient Mariner' and 'Christabel,' could
in any case have been worked much further.
At any rate, Coleridge, as his imaginative impulse flagged, passed
into the reflective stage; and, as was natural, his mind dwelt much
upon those principles of art which he had already discussed with
Wordsworth in his creative period. In saying that Coleridge was
primarily a poet, I did not mean to intimate that he was not also a
subtle dialectician. There is no real incompatibility between the
two faculties. A poetic literature which includes Shakespeare in the
past and Browning in the present is of itself a sufficient proof that
the keenest and most active logical faculty may be combined with
the truest poetical imagination. Coleridge's peculiar service to
English criticism consisted, indeed, in a great measure, in a clear
appreciation of the true relation between the faculties, a relation,
I think, which he never quite managed to express clearly. Poetry, as
he says, is properly opposed not to prose but to science. Its aim,
he infers, is not to establish truth but to communicate pleasure.
The poet presents us with the concrete symbol; the man of science
endeavours to analyse and abstract the laws embodied. Shakespeare was
certainly not a psychologist in the sense in which Professor Bain is
a psychologist. He does not state what are our ultimate faculties, or
how they act and react, and determine our conduct; but, so far as he
creates typical characters, he gives concrete psychology, or presents
the problems upon which psychology has to operate. Therefore, if
poetry, as Coleridge says after Milton, should be simple, sensuous,
passionate, instead of systematic, abstract, and emotionless, like
speculative reasoning, it is not to be inferred that the poet should
be positively unphilosophical, nor is he the better, as some recent
critics appear to have discovered, for merely appealing to the senses
as being without thoughts, or, in simpler words, a mere animal.
The loftiest poet and the loftiest philosopher deal with the same
subject-matter, the great problems of the world and of human life,
though one presents the symbolism and the other unravels the logical
connection of the abstract conceptions.
Coleridge, having practised, proceeded to preach. That a poet should
also be a good critic is no more surprising than that any man should
speak well on the art of which he is master. Our best critics of
poetry, at least, from Dryden to Matthew Arnold, have been (to invert
a famous maxim) poets who have succeeded. Coleridge's specific merit
was not, as I think, that he laid down any scientific theory. I
don't believe that any such theory has as yet any existence except
in embryo. He was something almost unique in this as in his poetry,
first because his criticism (so far as it was really excellent) was
the criticism of love, the criticism of a man who combined the first
simple impulse of admiration with the power of explaining why he
admired; and secondly, and as a result, because he placed himself at
the right point of view; because, to put it briefly, he was the first
great writer who criticised poetry as poetry, and not as science. The
preceding generation had asked, as Mrs. Barbauld asked: 'What is the
moral?' Has 'Othello' a moral catastrophe? What does 'Paradise Lost'
prove? Are the principles of Pope's 'Essay on Man' philosophical? or
is Goldsmith's 'Deserted Village' a sound piece of political economy?
The reply embodied in Coleridge's admirable criticisms, especially
of Shakespeare, was that this implied a total misconception of the
relations of poetry to philosophy. The 'moral' of a poem is not this
or that proposition tagged to it or deducible from it, moral or
otherwise; but the total effect of the stimulus to the imagination
and affections, or what Coleridge would call its dynamic effect. That
will, no doubt, depend partly upon the philosophy assumed in it; but
has no common ground with the merits of a demonstration in Euclid or
Spinoza. It is this adoption of a really new method which makes us
feel, when we compare Coleridge, not only with the critics of a past
generation, but even with very able and acute writers such as Jeffrey
or Hazlitt, who were his contemporaries, that we are in a freer and
larger atmosphere, and are in contact with deeper principles. It
raises another question, for it leads to Coleridge's most conscious
aim. Nothing is easier than to put the proper label on a poet—to call
him 'romantic,' or 'classical,' and so forth; and then, if he has a
predecessor of like principles, to explain him by the likeness, and
if he represents a change of principles, to make the change explain
itself by calling it a reaction. The method is delightfully simple,
and I can use the words as easily as my neighbours. The only thing
I find difficult is to look wise when I use them, or to fancy that
I give an explanation because I have adopted a classification.
Coleridge, both in poetry and philosophy, conceived himself to be one
of the leaders of such a reaction. He proposed to abolish the wicked,
mechanical, infidel, prosaic eighteenth century and go back to the
seventeenth. I do not believe in the possibility or the desirability
of any such reaction. I prefer my own grandfathers to their
grandfathers, and myself—including you and me—to my grandfathers. I am
quite sure that, if I did not, I could not make time run backwards. We
are far enough off to be just to the maligned eighteenth century, and
to keep all our uncharitableness for our contemporaries—it may do them
some good. I would never abuse the century which loved common-sense
and freedom of speech, and hated humbug and mystery; the century
in which first sprang to life most of the social and intellectual
movements which are still the best hope of our own; in which science
and history and invention first took their modern shape; the century
of David Hume, and Adam Smith, and Gibbon, and Burke, and Johnson, and
Fielding, and many old friends to whom I aver incalculable gratitude;
but I admit that, like other centuries, it had its faults. It was, no
doubt, unpoetical at its close—almost as unpoetical as the latter half
of the nineteenth; and somehow it had fallen into that queer blunder
of judging poetry by the canons of science. The old symbolism of an
earlier generation had faded, and for Pagan or Christian imagery we
had frigid personifications, such even as Coleridge quotes from some
prize poem: 'Inoculation, heavenly maid!' a deity who could be only
adored in a rhymed medical treatise. And Coleridge's charge against
the philosophy of the time was really identical with his charge
against the poetry.
Poetry, without the mystic or spiritual element, meant Darwin's
'Botanic Garden'—an ice-palace, as he called it, a heap of fine
phrases and sham personifications. Take the same element from
theology, and you have Paley's 'Evidences;' from morals, and the
residuum is Bentham's utilitarianism. Coleridge's nomenclature
expressed this, in a fashion. He was fond of saying that all men were
born Aristotelians or Platonists: Platonists, if, in his favourite
distinction, the reason and the imagination dominated in them,
and Aristotelians, if they had only the understanding, the almost
vulpine cunning, which was shared even by the lower animals, which
meant prudence in morality, reliance upon mere external evidence in
theology, and pure expediency in politics. How the Aristotelians
had come to rule the world ever since the opening of the eighteenth
century is a question which, so far as I know, he never answered. But
the effect of their dominion was equally to dethrone reason as to
asphyxiate imagination. The two were allies, if not an incarnation of
the same faculty. Inversely the Benthamites, till Mill was converted
by Wordsworth, regarded poetry as equivalent to mere tintinnabulation
and lying, or, as Carlyle's friend put it, the 'prodooction of a rude
age.' It was as much in his character of poet as of philosopher
that Coleridge hated political economy, the favourite science of the
Benthamites; for, according to him, it was an illustration of their
destructive method. The economist deals with mere barren abstractions,
and then misapplies them to the concrete organism, the life of
which, according to the common metaphor, has been destroyed by his
dissecting knife. Coleridge goes too far in speaking as if analysis
were in itself a mischievous instead of an important process, much as
Wordsworth thought that every man of science was ready to botanise on
his mother's grave. But, on the other hand, the clear conviction that
a society could only be explained as an organic and continuous whole
enables him to point out very distinctly the limits of the opposite
school. One indication of this contrast may be found in Coleridge's
theory of Church and State. It is curious that Mill, in his essay
upon Coleridge, especially admires him for taking into account the
historical element in which Bentham was deficient. It is curious
because it is remarkable that the leader of a school which boasted
specially of resting upon experience, should admit that it was weak
precisely in not appreciating the historical method on which surely
experience should be founded. It seems almost as if the antagonists
had changed weapons like the duellists in 'Hamlet.' The _à priori_
thinker rests upon experience, and the empiricist upon a really _à
priori_ method.