What is the deadest of things earthly? It is, says the world, ever
forward and rash--'a door-nail!' But the world is wrong. There is a
thing deader than a door-nail, viz., Gillman's Coleridge, Vol. I. Dead,
more dead, most dead, is Gillman's Coleridge, Vol. I.; and this
upon more arguments than one. The book has clearly not completed its
elementary act of respiration; the _systole_ of Vol. I. is absolutely
useless and lost without the _diastole_ of that Vol. II., which is never
to exist. That is one argument, and perhaps this second argument is
stronger. Gillman's Coleridge, Vol. I., deals rashly, unjustly, and
almost maliciously, with some of our own particular friends; and yet,
until late in this summer, _Anno Domini_ 1844, we--that is, neither
ourselves nor our friends--ever heard of its existence. Now a sloth,
even without the benefit of Mr. Waterton's evidence to his character,
will travel faster than that. But malice, which travels fastest of
all things, must be dead and cold at starting, when it can thus have
lingered in the rear for six years; and therefore, though the world
was so far right, that people _do_ say, 'Dead as a door-nail,' yet,
henceforward, the weakest of these people will see the propriety of
saying--'Dead as Gillman's Coleridge.'
The reader of experience, on sliding over the surface of this opening
paragraph, begins to think there's mischief singing in the upper air.
'No, reader, not at all. We never were cooler in our days. And this we
protest, that, were it not for the excellence of the subject, _Coleridge
and Opium-Eating_, Mr. Gillman would have been dismissed by us
unnoticed. Indeed, we not only forgive Mr. Gillman, but we have
a kindness for him; and on this account, that he was good, he was
generous, he was most forbearing, through twenty years, to poor
Coleridge, when thrown upon his hospitality. An excellent thing _that_,
Mr. Gillman, till, noticing the theme suggested by this unhappy Vol.
I., we are forced at times to notice its author, Nor is this to be
regretted. We remember a line of Horace never yet properly translated,
viz:--
'Nec scutica dignum horribili sectere flagello.'
The true translation of which, as we assure the unlearned reader,
is--'Nor must you pursue with the horrid knout of Christopher that man
who merits only a switching.' Very true. We protest against all attempts
to invoke the exterminating knout; for _that_ sends a man to the
hospital for two months; but you see that the same judicious poet, who
dissuades an appeal to the knout, indirectly recommends the switch,
which, indeed, is rather pleasant than otherwise, amiably playful
in some of its little caprices, and in its worst, suggesting only a
pennyworth of diachylon.
We begin by professing, with hearty sincerity, our fervent admiration
of the extraordinary man who furnishes the theme for Mr. Gillman's
_coup-d'essai_ in biography. He was, in a literary sense, our
brother--for he also was amongst the contributors to _Blackwood_--and
will, we presume, take his station in that Blackwood gallery of
portraits, which, in a century hence, will possess more interest for
intellectual Europe than any merely martial series of portraits, or any
gallery of statesmen assembled in congress, except as regards one or two
leaders; for defunct major-generals, and secondary diplomatists,
when their date is past, awake no more emotion than last year's
advertisements, or obsolete directories; whereas those who, in a stormy
age, have swept the harps of passion, of genial wit, or of the wrestling
and gladiatorial reason, become more interesting to men when they can no
longer be seen as bodily agents, than even in the middle chorus of that
intellectual music over which, living, they presided.
Of this great camp Coleridge was a leader, and fought amongst the
_primipili_; yet, comparatively, he is still unknown. Heavy, indeed, are
the arrears still due to philosophic curiosity on the real merits,
and on the separate merits, of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge as a
poet--Coleridge as a philosopher! How extensive are those questions,
if those were all! and upon neither question have we yet any
investigation--such as, by compass of views, by research, or even by
earnestness of sympathy with the subject, can, or ought to satisfy, a
philosophic demand. Blind is that man who can persuade himself that the
interest in Coleridge, taken as a total object, is becoming an obsolete
interest. We are of opinion that even Milton, now viewed from a distance
of two centuries, is still inadequately judged or appreciated in
his character of poet, of patriot and partisan, or, finally, in his
character of accomplished scholar. But, if so, how much less can it
be pretended that satisfaction has been rendered to the claims of
Coleridge? for, upon Milton, libraries have been written. There has been
time for the malice of men, for the jealousy of men, for the enthusiasm,
the scepticism, the adoring admiration of men, to expand themselves!
There has been room for a Bentley, for an Addison, for a Johnson, for a
wicked Lauder, for an avenging Douglas, for an idolizing Chateaubriand;
and yet, after all, little enough has been done towards any
comprehensive estimate of the mighty being concerned. Piles of materials
have been gathered to the ground; but, for the monument which should
have risen from these materials, neither the first stone has been laid,
nor has a qualified architect yet presented his credentials. On the
other hand, upon Coleridge little, comparatively, has yet been written,
whilst the separate characters on which the judgment is awaited, are
more by one than those which Milton sustained. Coleridge, also, is a
poet; Coleridge, also, was mixed up with the fervent politics of his
age--an age how memorably reflecting the revolutionary agitations of
Milton's age. Coleridge, also, was an extensive and brilliant scholar.
Whatever might be the separate proportions of the two men in each
particular department of the three here noticed, think as the reader
will upon that point, sure we are that either subject is ample enough to
make a strain upon the amplest faculties. How alarming, therefore,
for any _honest_ critic, who should undertake this later subject of
Coleridge, to recollect that, after pursuing him through a zodiac of
splendors corresponding to those of Milton in kind, however different in
degree--after weighing him as a poet, as a philosophic politician, as
a scholar, he will have to wheel after him into another orbit, into
the unfathomable _nimbus_ of transcendental metaphysics. Weigh him the
critic must in the golden balance of philosophy the most abstruse--a
balance which even itself requires weighing previously, or he will
have done nothing that can be received for an estimate of the composite
Coleridge. This astonishing man, be it again remembered, besides being
an exquisite poet, a profound political speculator, a philosophic
student of literature through all its chambers and recesses, was also
a circumnavigator on the most pathless waters of scholasticism and
metaphysics. He had sounded, without guiding charts, the secret deeps
of Proclus and Plotinus; he had laid down buoys on the twilight, or
moonlight, ocean of Jacob Boehmen; [Footnote: 'JACOB BOEHMEN.' We
ourselves had the honor of presenting to Mr. Coleridge, Law's English
version of Jacob--a set of huge quartos. Some months afterwards we saw
this work lying open, and one volume at least overflowing, in parts,
with the commentaries and the _corollaries_ of Coleridge. Whither has
this work, and so many others swathed about with Coleridge's MS. notes,
vanished from the world?] he had cruised over the broad Atlantic of Kant
and Schelling, of Fichte and Oken. Where is the man who shall be equal
to these things? We at least make no such adventurous effort; or, if
ever we should presume to do so, not at present. Here we design only
to make a coasting voyage of survey round the headlands and most
conspicuous seamarks of our subject, as they are brought forward by
Mr. Gillman, or collaterally suggested by our own reflections; and
especially we wish to say a word or two on Coleridge as an opium-eater.
Naturally the first point to which we direct our attention, is the
history and personal relations of Coleridge. Living with Mr. Gillman for
nineteen years as a domesticated friend, Coleridge ought to have
been known intimately. And it is reasonable to expect, from so much
intercourse, some additions to our slender knowledge of Coleridge's
adventures, (if we may use so coarse a word,) and of the secret springs
at work in those early struggles of Coleridge at Cambridge, London,
Bristol, which have been rudely told to the world, and repeatedly told,
as showy romances, but never rationally explained.
The anecdotes, however, which Mr. Gillman has added to the personal
history of Coleridge, are as little advantageous to the effect of his
own book as they are to the interest of the memorable character which he
seeks to illustrate. Always they are told without grace, and generally
are suspicious in their details. Mr. Gillman we believe to be too
upright a man for countenancing any untruth. He has been deceived. For
example, will any man believe this? A certain 'excellent equestrian'
falling in with Coleridge on horseback, thus accosted him--'Pray, Sir,
did you meet a tailor along the road?' '_A tailor_!' answered Coleridge;
'_I did meet a person answering such a description, who told me he had
dropped his goose; that if I rode a little further I should find it; and
I guess he must have meant you._' In Joe Miller this story would
read, perhaps, sufferably. Joe has a privilege; and we do not look too
narrowly into the mouth of a Joe-Millerism. But Mr. Gillman, writing
the life of a philosopher, and no jest-book, is under a different law of
decorum. That retort, however, which silences the jester, it may seem,
must be a good one. And we are desired to believe that, in this case,
the baffled assailant rode off in a spirit of benign candor, saying
aloud to himself, like the excellent philosopher that he evidently was,
'Caught a Tartar!'
But another story of a sporting baronet, who was besides a Member of
Parliament, is much worse, and altogether degrading to Coleridge.
This gentleman, by way of showing off before a party of ladies, is
represented as insulting Coleridge by putting questions to him on the
qualities of his horse, so as to draw the animal's miserable defects
into public notice, and then closing his display by demanding what he
would take for the horse 'including the rider.' The supposed reply
of Coleridge might seem good to those who understand nothing of true
dignity; for, as an _impromptu_, it was smart and even caustic. The
baronet, it seems, was reputed to have been bought by the minister; and
the reader will at once divine that the retort took advantage of that
current belief, so as to throw back the sarcasm, by proclaiming that
neither horse nor rider had a price placarded in the market at which any
man could become their purchaser. But this was not the temper in which
Coleridge either did reply, or could have replied. Coleridge showed, in
the _spirit_ of his manner, a profound sensibility to the nature of
a gentleman; and he felt too justly what it became a self-respecting
person to say, ever to have aped the sort of flashy fencing which might
seem fine to a theatrical blood.
Another story is self-refuted: 'A hired partisan' had come to one of
Coleridge's political lectures with the express purpose of bringing the
lecturer into trouble; and most preposterously he laid himself open
to his own snare by refusing to pay for admission. Spies must be poor
artists who proceed thus. Upon which Coleridge remarked--'That, before
the gentleman kicked up a dust, surely he would down with the dust.'
So far the story will not do. But what follows is possible enough.
The _same_ 'hired' gentleman, by way of giving unity to the tale, is
described as having hissed. Upon this a cry arose of 'Turn him out!' But
Coleridge interfered to protect him; he insisted on the man's right to
hiss if he thought fit; it was legal to hiss; it was natural to hiss;
'for what is to be expected, gentlemen, when the cool waters of reason
come in contact with red-hot aristocracy, but a hiss?' _Euge!_
Amongst all the anecdotes, however of this splendid man, often trivial,
often incoherent, often unauthenticated, there is one which strikes us
as both true and interesting; and we are grateful to Mr. Gillman for
preserving it. We find it introduced, and partially authenticated, by
the following sentence from Coleridge himself:--'From eight to fourteen
I was a playless day-dreamer, a _helluo librorum_; my appetite for which
was indulged by a singular incident. A stranger, who was struck by my
conversation, made me free of a circulating library in King's Street,
Cheapside.' The more circumstantial explanation of Mr. Gillman is this:
`The incident indeed was singular. Going down the Strand, in one of his
day-dreams, fancying himself swimming across the Hellespont, thrusting
his hands before him as in the act of swimming, his hand came in contact
with a gentleman's pocket. The gentleman seized his hand, turning round,
and looking at him with some anger--"What! so young, and yet so wicked?"
at the same time accused him of an attempt to pick his pocket. The
frightened boy sobbed out his denial of the intention, and explained to
him how he thought himself Leander swimming across the Hellespont. The
gentleman was so struck and delighted with the novelty of the thing, and
with the simplicity and intelligence of the boy, that he subscribed,
as before stated, to the library; in consequence of which Coleridge was
further enabled to indulge his love of reading.'
We fear that this slovenly narrative is the very perfection of bad
story-telling. But the story itself is striking, and, by the very
oddness of the incidents, not likely to have been invented. The effect,
from the position of the two parties--on the one side, a simple child
from Devonshire, dreaming in the Strand that he was swimming over from
Sestos to Abydos, and, on the other, the experienced man, dreaming
only of this world, its knaves and its thieves, but still kind and
generous--is beautiful and picturesque. _Oh! si sic omnia!_
But the most interesting to us of the _personalities_ connected with
Coleridge are his feuds and his personal dislikes. Incomprehensible to
us is the war of extermination which Coleridge made upon the political
economists. Did Sir James Steuart, in speaking of vine-dressers, (not
_as_ vine-dressers, but generally as cultivators,) tell his readers,
that, if such a man simply replaced his own consumption, having no
surplus whatever or increment for the public capital, he could not be
considered a useful citizen? Not the beast in the Revelation is held up
by Coleridge as more hateful to the spirit of truth than the Jacobite
baronet. And yet we know of an author--viz., one S. T. Coleridge--who
repeated that same doctrine without finding any evil in it. Look at the
first part of the _Wallenstein_, where Count Isolani having said, 'Pooh!
we are _all_ his subjects,' _i. e._, soldiers, (though unproductive
laborers,) not less than productive peasants, the emperor's envoy
replies--'Yet with a difference, general;' and the difference implies
Sir James's scale, his vine-dresser being the equatorial case between
the two extremes of the envoy. Malthus again, in his population-book,
contends for a mathematic difference between animal and vegetable life,
in respect to the law of increase, as though the first increased by
geometrical ratios, the last by arithmetical! No proposition more
worthy of laughter; since both, when permitted to expand, increase
by geometrical ratios, and the latter by much higher ratios. Whereas,
Malthus persuaded himself of his crotchet simply by refusing the
requisite condition in the vegetable case, and granting it in the
other. If you take a few grains of wheat, and are required to plant all
successive generations of their produce in the same flower-pot for ever,
of course you neutralize its expansion by your own act of arbitrary
limitation. [Footnote: Malthus would have rejoined by saying--that the
flowerpot limitation was the actual limitation of nature in our present
circumstances. In America it is otherwise, he would say, but England
is the very flowerpot you suppose; she is a flowerpot which cannot be
multiplied, and cannot even be enlarged. Very well, so be it (which we
say in order to waive irrelevant disputes). But then the true inference
will be--not that vegetable increase proceeds under a different law from
that which governs animal increase, but that, through an accident of
position, the experiment cannot be tried in England. Surely the levers
of Archimedes, with submission to Sir Edward B. Lytton, were not the
less levers because he wanted the _locum standi_. It is proper, by the
way, that we should inform the reader of this generation where to look
for Coleridge's skirmishings with Malthus. They are to be found chiefly
in the late Mr. William Hazlitt's work on that subject: a work which
Coleridge so far claimed as to assert that it had been substantially
made up from his own conversation.] But so you would do, if you tried
the case of _animal_ increase by still exterminating all but one
replacing couple of parents. This is not to try, but merely a pretence
of trying, one order of powers against another. That was folly. But
Coleridge combated this idea in a manner so obscure, that nobody
understood it. And leaving these speculative conundrums, in coming to
the great practical interests afloat in the Poor Laws, Coleridge did so
little real work, that he left, as a _res integra_, to Dr. Alison,
the capital argument that legal and _adequate_ provision for the poor,
whether impotent poor or poor accidentally out of work, does not extend
pauperism--no, but is the one great resource for putting it down. Dr.
Alison's overwhelming and _experimental_ manifestations of that truth
have prostrated Malthus and his generation for ever. This comes of not
attending to the Latin maxim--'_Hoc_ age'--mind the object before you.
Dr. Alison, a wise man, '_hoc_ egit:' Coleridge '_aliud_ egit.' And we
see the result. In a case which suited him, by interesting his peculiar
feeling, Coleridge could command
'Attention full ten times as much as there needs.'
But search documents, value evidence, or thresh out bushels of
statistical tables, Coleridge could not, any more than he could ride
with Elliot's dragoons.
Another instance of Coleridge's inaptitude for such studies as political
economy is found in his fancy, by no means 'rich and rare,' but meagre
and trite, that taxes can never injure public prosperity by mere excess
of quantity; if they injure, we are to conclude that it must be by their
quality and mode of operation, or by their false appropriation, (as,
for instance, if they are sent out of the country and spent abroad.)
Because, says Coleridge, if the taxes are exhaled from the country as
vapors, back they come in drenching showers. Twenty pounds ascend in a
Scotch mist to the Chancellor of the Exchequer from Leeds; but does it
evaporate? Not at all: By return of post down comes an order for twenty
pounds' worth of Leeds cloth, on account of Government, seeing that
the poor men of the ----th regiment want new gaiters. True; but of this
return twenty pounds, not more than four will be profit, _i.e._, surplus
accruing to the public capital; whereas, of the original twenty pounds,
every shilling was surplus. The same unsound fancy has been many times
brought forward; often in England, often in France. But it is curious,
that its first appearance upon any stage was precisely two centuries
ago, when as yet political economy slept with the pre-Adamites, viz., in
the Long Parliament. In a quarto volume of the debates during 1644-45,
printed as an independent work, will be found the same identical
doctrine, supported very sonorously by the same little love of an
illustration from the see-saw of mist and rain.
Political economy was not Coleridge's forte. In politics he was happier.
In mere personal politics, he (like every man when reviewed from a
station distant by forty years) will often appear to have erred; nay,
he will be detected and nailed in error. But this is the necessity of us
all. Keen are the refutations of time. And absolute results to posterity
are the fatal touchstone of opinions in the past. It is undeniable,
besides, that Coleridge had strong personal antipathies, for instance,
to Messrs. Pitt and Dundas. Yet _why_, we never could understand. We
once heard him tell a story upon Windermere, to the late Mr. Curwen,
then M. P. for Workington, which was meant, apparently, to account
for this feeling. The story amounted to this; that, when a freshman at
Cambridge, Mr. Pitt had wantonly amused himself at a dinner party
in Trinity, in smashing with filberts (discharged in showers like
grape-shot) a most costly dessert set of cut glass, from which
Samuel Taylor Coleridge argued a principle of destructiveness in his
_cerebellum_. Now, if this dessert set belonged to some poor suffering
Trinitarian, and not to himself, we are of opinion that he was faulty,
and ought, upon his own great subsequent maxim, to have been coerced
into 'indemnity for the past, and security for the future.' But, besides
that this glassy _mythus_ belongs to an æra fifteen years earlier than
Coleridge's so as to justify a shadow of scepticism, we really cannot
find, in such an _escapade_ under the boiling blood of youth, any
sufficient justification of that withering malignity towards the name
of Pitt, which runs through Coleridge's famous _Fire, Famine,
and Slaughter_. As this little viperous _jeu-d'esprit_ (published
anonymously) subsequently became the subject of a celebrated
after-dinner discussion in London, at which Coleridge (_comme de
raison_) was the chief speaker, the reader of this generation may wish
to know the question at issue; and in order to judge of _that_, he must
know the outline of this devil's squib. The writer brings upon the scene
three pleasant young ladies, viz., Miss Fire, Miss Famine, and Miss
Slaughter. 'What are you up to? What's the row?'--we may suppose to
be the introductory question of the poet. And the answer of the ladies
makes us aware that they are fresh from larking in Ireland, and
in France. A glorious spree they had; lots of fun; and laughter _a
discretion_. At all times _gratus puellæ risus ab angulo_; so that we
listen to their little gossip with interest. They had been setting
men, it seems, by the ears; and the drollest little atrocities they do
certainly report. Not but we have seen better in the Nenagh paper, so
far as Ireland is concerned. But the pet little joke was in La Vendee.
Miss Famine, who is the girl for our money, raises the question--whether
any of them can tell the name of the leader and prompter to these high
jinks of hell--if so, let her whisper it.
'Whisper it, sister, so and so,
In a dark hint--distinct and low.'